[star rating=”4″] LOVING VINCENT. Directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman with Douglas Booth, Jerome Flynn and Robert Gulaczyk.
MEGAN FURNISS reviews
Watching this movie is as strange and as wonderful as returning to a Van Gogh painting and staring at it until the swirls move and your heart fills.
Loving Vincent lives up to its name; a massive labour of love, honouring Vincent van Gogh in a reimagining of the time before his death. Moreover, the whole feature length film has been animated in hand painted oils in the style of Van Gogh’s paintings. It’s like jumping down a Van Gogh rabbit hole – beautiful, unsettling and strangely familiar if you, like me, studied his famous paintings in art class.
The narrative is the vehicle to explore this unique movie medium. A young man is encouraged by his father to go on a journey to deliver a letter, written by Vincent a few weeks before he died, to his brother Theo. Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) goes off to find Theo, only to discover he has also died. Through various characters in the small village where Vincent went to recuperate before taking his own life, Armand is able to put together a picture of the man and his relationships.
It is unsettling to recognise the performers in their painted forms, but strangely beautiful too. In fact, the styling and art of the movie is stronger than its narrative content, which is quite amazing. And the painting and animation is exquisite. It is a movie that washes over you, zooming in and out through brush stroke, colour and form. Crows, flowers, fields, stars, candle and lamp light, chairs, beds, rooms, people, faces, prostitutes, drunks, water, cigarettes, wine, fistfights, and light through windows …
The swirling, painterly style of Van Gogh gives full expression to the emotion of the characters, and their time and place, with flashbacks getting their own black and white version of the treatment. Mood, light and emotion are as fluid and changing as water. Tears are suggested and then disappear. A sharp brushstroke of an eyebrow is a flash of anger.
The only thing I found strangely jarring was the out of place strong British accents. I guess it is because the movie is an interesting collaboration between Polish and British teams.
Loving Vincent is an impossible-to-categorise experience, separate from reality but reflecting our world back to us painfully, beautifully, creatively.
What: Loving Vincent
Opens: Nationwide at cinemas on 23 February 2018
WS
