Loving Vincent
Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman (2017)
The Van Gogh biography Loving Vincent has its place in cinema history. This is ‘the first fully painted animated feature film … Each of the film’s 65,000 frames is an oil painting on canvas, using the same technique as Van Gogh, created by a team of 115 painters’ (Wikipedia). The animators Hugh Welchman and Dorota Kobiela, who are husband and wife (he’s British, she’s Polish), shot the film first as a live-action piece with actors. Each frame was then hand-painted over. At first, the effect is close to magical: although the visual style isn’t realistic, you experience the feeling of getting ‘inside’ the images and the Van Gogh art works that inspired them. After a while, this viewer started taking the unique look for granted (as I tend to do special effects generally). Part of the achievement of Loving Vincent as an animated film is to remind you what animation means: the directors really do bring Van Gogh’s paintings to life. They don’t, however, bring the story they tell (Kobiela and Welchman also co-wrote the screenplay) to dramatic life. The film is very pleasant but that is increasingly insufficient. It’s apt that Don McLean’s appealing, soppy song ‘Vincent’ plays during the closing credits.
A year after Van Gogh’s death in 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise, a postman called Roulin, who knew and liked the painter, asks his son Armand to deliver Vincent’s last letter to his brother Theo, after previous attempts to do so have failed. Roulin père, as well as unaware that Theo died less than six months after his elder sibling, is baffled that Vincent should have committed suicide: a letter the artist sent Roulin shortly before his death suggested he was in good spirits. Armand, somewhat reluctantly but knowing the strength of his father’s affection for Vincent, accepts the mission. This starting point suggests a what-really-happened amateur detective story to follow but Armand’s meetings with those who knew Van Gogh in the last days of his life are not intriguing. It doesn’t help either that the monochrome images used by Kobiela and Welchman to distinguish flashbacks involving Vincent from the story’s present tense have a pseudo-photographic quality which jars.
Some of the acting is very good, even if it’s not enough to stop you thinking how tepid Loving Vincent would be as live action. It’s no surprise that Saoirse Ronan is impressive as Marguerite Gachet, the daughter of the doctor with whom Van Gogh lodged after being released from an asylum. The revelation is Eleanor Tomlinson whose strength of characterisation of the innkeeper Adeline Ravoux is admirable. Tomlinson is best known (so far) as Demelza in the BBC Poldark; Aidan Turner, her co-star from that series, is a boatman in Loving Vincent and predictably less impressive than she is. Douglas Booth isn’t bad as Armand, though his voice seems to betray an awareness of how the film will end up – he sounds not quite for real. Jerome Flynn’s Gachet bears a remarkable resemblance to Van Gogh’s portraits of the doctor. The cast also includes Chris O’Dowd (Postman Roulin), Robert Gulaczyk (Vincent), John Sessions (Père Tanguy) and Helen McCrory (Dr Gachet’s housekeeper). It’s a pity the film-makers’ amazing technique hasn’t managed to wipe the permanently self-satisfied smile off McCrory’s face.
17 October 2017