Starry, starry fright
Yes, it’s brilliantly made, like a living Van Gogh painting, but somewhere in the process they forgot to add the colour
Like many, I’d been absolutely astonished by interviews given in advance of the release of Loving Vincent, explaining how the film’s remarkable animation came to be made. No painted gels or computer trickery, apparently; instead, more than 100 talented artists, mainly from Poland and Greece, hand-painting every single frame, in oils, in the unmistakable style of the film’s celebrated subject, Vincent van Gogh.
At 12 frames per second and with a running time of just over 90 minutes, that’s 65,000 frames in all. Each one a mini-masterpiece, I had fondly imagined, a gorgeous concoction of cornfields and blue flowers, of haystacks and swirly blue skies.
All that turns out to be sort of true and… not, a shortcoming that provides the first of several reasons why Loving Vincent turns out to be one of those nobly intentioned films that is ‘very good but...’
When it comes to the animation, all those brush strokes become difficult to watch when repeated 65,000 times, but a significant proportion of the film isn’t really what most people would regard as ‘hand-painted’ at all. Instead, in a film in which the main story plays out in 1891, a year after the painter’s mysterious death at the age of just 37, much of the flashbacks to events leading up to his death are in a distressed monochrome that, while obviously augmented by an animator’s brush, are also clearly based on live-action footage. The distinctive features of a cast that includes Douglas Booth, Jerome Flynn and the Poldark stars Eleanor Tomlinson and Aidan Turner shine through with a realism that few artists – and certainly not van Gogh – could ever hope to capture.
For a story so thoroughly set in France, the Irish and British accents are a surprise too, and, just for once, I did wonder whether the ’Allo! ’Allo! approach – everyone speaking English but with a charming French accent – might have been less jarring. A little consistency might have been helpful too. Instead we have Chris O’Dowd and Booth lending the voices to play father and son. O’Dowd, from Roscommon, uses his own accent while Booth – playing Armand Roulin – opts for something flatter and more London. Which seems odd.
It was Armand’s father, Joseph (O’Dowd), an Arles postman, who befriended the mentally unstable artist during his troubled stay in the south of France, during which he was hospitalised for many months in St Rémy asylum. But it is after Vincent’s death, when Joseph discovers he has a letter from Vincent to his artdealer brother, Theo, that the story gets properly under way. When attempts to forward the letter prove unsuccessful, Joseph – a postman, remember – resolves that there is only one solution. Armand will have to travel to the scene of Vincent’s death, Auvers-sur-Oise, and attempt to deliver the letter himself.
It’s a slow old start, with the combination of that striking but somewhat lifeless animation, Booth’s lacklustre performance and a thin story struggling to hold our attention. It’s only when Armand is distracted by events surrounding Van Gogh’s death that things perk up. Suddenly it’s become a detective story.
Anyone with a fondness for the 1991 film Van Gogh, however, is in for a disappointment. There are no cheerful prostitutes, no can-cans in Montmartre and no suggestion that Van Gogh had an affair with the daughter of his physician, Dr Gachet. Also, Van Gogh himself remains an elusive presence. Instead, Armand’s enquiries focus on the still-fascinating questions of where Van Gogh’s gun came from, why he shot himself in the stomach and what happened to all his painting equipment.
The end result is very good, though somewhat sanitised, and I’m not sure the rerecording of Don McLean’s Vincent really helps.
‘Where did Van Gogh’s gun come from, where did his painting equipment go? The questions still fascinate’