Loving Vincent review: a beautifully textured tribute to Van Gogh.
The fact that the process that took six years, would be remarkable enough in itself. But painted to look exactly like the work of Vincent van Gogh? That’s something else. Corn fields shimmer and rustle with slight flickers of the impasto. The night sky sparkles and swirls. And faces – even the recognisable ones of a noted British cast – pose for a set of portraits that are rarely short of captivating.
The directors are British animator Hugh Welchman and his wife Dorota Kobiela, a Polish-born artist. They worked with 125 artists to paint the film’s 65,000 individual frames, inspired in each sequence by specific van Gogh paintings. Footage was shot of the cast playing out scenes on rudimentary sets, then this was projected on to canvases, frame by frame, and painted over. The visual effect is overwhelming, a luxurious immersion in the palette and environment of a celebrated artist.
The script is somewhat more down-to-earth, with the occasional feel of a biographical walk-through that you might hear acted out on a museum tour. Van Gogh himself is the mystery at the bottom of it, rather than the central figure. It’s set a year after his death, with family friend Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), who has been sent by his father (Chris O’Dowd) to deliver a letter to Vincent’s brother Theo, trying to puzzle out the artist’s state of mind when he died. Addressed is the theory that van Gogh may not have taken his own life, but been shot by a disturbed teenage boy.
As biopics go, it’s psychologically rudimentary: the flashbacks to friendships Vincent experienced, which switch to sharper, more contrasty black and white, are academically parcelled out and don’t hold many surprises. Instead, it’s all about surrendering yourself to the textures of scenes – the tinkling of cups in a tea-room, the sounds of bickering in a bar. Clint Mansell’s elegantly mournful score does an important job in knitting it all together into a flowing piece of embroidery you want to stay with. And the novelty of seeing Saoirse Ronan’s face, and Helen McCrory’s, and Aidan Turner’s, converted into moving-image portraits by these disciples of van Gogh’s style, remains considerable to the end.
To be fair, the film perhaps runs into the mere bad luck that cinema has done pretty well by van Gogh in the past: especially the two wonderful creations by Vincente Minnelli (1956’s Lust for Life) and Maurice Pialat (1991’s Van Gogh), not to mention an Altman one, and so on. A further forthcoming biopic, starring Willem Dafoe and directed by Julian Schnabel, will adopt a first-person point of view. One thing’s for sure: a curio it may be, and skimpy on the human element, but Loving Vincent certainly doesn’t skimp on the beauty or the brushstrokes.
Tim Robey, The Telegraph, 12th October 2017.
‘Loving Vincent’ review: Hand-painted movie about Van Gogh is exquisite.
You have, I am certain, never seen anything quite like “Loving Vincent,” which is being promoted as the world’s first entirely hand-painted movie. It’s an animated film, but that descriptor isn’t quite accurate: To tell this story about a mystery surrounding the 1890 death of artist Vincent Van Gogh, filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman assembled a cast, found period-appropriate costumes and sets, and shot the film. Then the real work began: Every frame — more than 65,000 of them — was hand-painted over in oil paint in the style of Van Gogh, by a team of more than 100 artists.
The result is a curious and often exquisite blend of two art forms. With settings and characters inspired by a number of Van Gogh’s paintings, the film unfolds as if the viewer fell asleep in a museum and dreamt of art that came alive. Blue clouds swirl over a village; a night sky blinks with lacy stars; a butter-yellow sun sinks over a tangerine-colored field; a dim tavern is lit by gold and green rings of light — all rendered in visibly textured brushstrokes. Rain falls in dashes of straight gray lines; a head of blond hair catches a bit of blue from the sky.
“Loving Vincent” is almost too beautiful for its own good; I found myself, too often, so dazzled by the form that I quite forgot about the content. If this script had been conventionally filmed and released, I suspect the movie might be quickly forgotten; the story, which moves backward and forward from Van Gogh’s life into events after his death, doesn’t feel fully developed. But that doesn’t really matter; it was a pleasure to become happily lost in this unique film’s world of color and line, and to see two filmmakers’ mad dream come true.
Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times, 17th October 2017.
What is F-Rated?
The F-Rating is applied to all films which are:
- Directed by women
- Written by women
- Has one or more significant women on screen
If it qualifies with one of the above it gets the Bronze rating.
If it qualifies with two of the above it gets the Silver rating.
If it qualifies with all three of the above it gets the Gold rating.