Van Gogh

There has been a proliferation of films about Vincent van Gogh, the painter who, along with Rembrandt, most exercises the popular imagination. And Van Gogh has the edge over Rembrandt for having been mad; there is nothing the public relishes more than the image of the artist as madman and failure. A painter who in his 37 years sold only one painting--there's something to feel comfortingly superior to! "And yet what beauty the poor fellow created," the prosaic burgher sighs with patronizing melancholy, to show that he is no philistine, after all.

Whatever one may say against Maurice Piaiat's Van Gogh, one must concede that it is the most detailed scrutiny yet of Van Gogh's last phase, and the least conventional. It's the final 67 days of the painter's life, under the supervision of Dr. Gachet at Auverssur-Oise, that this 155-minute movie examines. Pialat is in some ways a kindred spirit of Van Gogh's: he, too, was a painter; he, too, tried various things before finding his real calling; he, too, is said to be hard te get along with. The film is an interesting combination of telling all (including some apparently new findings) realistically, and also respecting the ultimate mystery of genius without trying te explain it away.

I am insufficiently versed in the vast literature on Van Gogh to say how much of the movie, which Pialat both wrote and directed, is documented fact, and how much surmise or pure invention. But as Pialat conceives Vincent, and as Jacques Dutronc plays him, this is more of a normal human being tormented by syphilis-induced headaches and outbursts of fury than some sort of divine madman lightly touching the earth on his transit to the stars. He has an affair with Marguerite, Gachet's spirited but undisciplined daughter.; abandons her for his former favorite among prostitutes, then resumes with her; has a complicated relationship with his devoted brother and keeper, Theo, and Johanna, Theo's wife, whose financial concern for their growing family conflicts with her husband's fraternal charity; and finds Dr. Gachet rather less tolerant after he discovers the dalliance with his daughter.

Dr. G. Kraus, the Dutch alienist who published a 49-page analysis of Van Gogh's "illness" in 1941, could not resolve what it was, though he did call it psychopathic: "In his art no less than in his 'illness,' [Van Gogh] was an individualist," he concluded. But the painter Paul Signac, a friend of Vincent's, wrote, "Never did he give me the impression of being a madman. Though he ate hardly anything, what he drank was always too much... absinthes and brandies would follow one another .... He was charm personified. He loved life passionately." There are as many Van Goghs as there are people writing about him.

Pialat's Vincent does not drink all that much, but he is intense, unpredictable, sometimes violent. Mostly, though, he is silent and aloof. The talking is done chiefly by others, notably Marguerite, who chatters on and on. Although the cut-off ear is mentioned, when the camera zeroes in on it, we see it is unscathed. Is Pialat trying to tell us something, or was it simply easier and cheaper not to bother? Dutronc, though a good actor, evidently did not take the role seriously enough to sacrifice so much as a lobe to it. The actor did not even make much of an effort to achieve physical likeness to Vincent, just as the excellent Bernard Le Coq is not made up to look like Theo. A beard is as far as either will go toward visual verisimilitude-perhaps just as well.

Authoritativeness is achieved in other ways. What little we see of Vincent's hand as it attacks a canvas looks authentic, as do the sitters and landscapes of Vincent's paintings. But the paintings are not brought to life in emphatic, extended fashion; they are tossed off with canny casualness. So, too, fellow artists such as ToulouseLautrec and Suzanne Valadon (then still an artist's model) make appropriately throwaway appearances, even as life in the bistros and brothels is swiftly but flavorously captured.

There is good acting from everyone, notably from Gerard Sety as a well-meaning, supportive, but not especially competent--and eventually torn and exasperated---Gachet, and from Leslie Azzoulai as the quietly devoted innkeeper's daughter who intermittently looks after Vincent. The film is rich in atmosphere, and conveys moods incisively, but answers no previously unanswered questions. Two and a half hours plus is a long time, and there are moments when we do yearn for that gunshot to ring out across the wheatfields.

For my money, the finest evocation of Van Gogh's spirit is still the shortest: Jacques Prevert's magnificent poem "Complainte de Vincent," with such verses in it as "11 ale regard bleu et doux/Le vrai regard lucide et fou/ De ceux qui donnent tout a la vie." I cannot translate this--nobody can-- without losing the music, the poetry: the very things that Pialat's film cannot catch for all its dogged sincerity.

COPYRIGHT 1992 National Review, Inc.
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