Doco finds more to Munch than just The Scream
Munch: Love, Ghosts and Lady Vampires (E, 90 mins) Directed by Michele Mally Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863. His family maintained a facade of middle-class respectability when, in fact, they were brutally impoverished.
Munch’s father was a doctor, but he was driven nearly mad – and into extreme religious piety – when wife Laura died in 1868.
Edvard’s favourite sister followed nine years later.
Growing up, the young Munch was a precociously talented drawer. But he believed himself to be literally haunted.
Munch would live in fear of developing the same mental illness his father seems to have endured.
Today, Munch is remembered by most people for The Scream, which is surely one of the best known and embedded-in-the-culture paintings in history.
The Scream was inspired by a vision – or a dream – that Munch had while walking along a hilltop road at sunset with two friends. Another of Munch’s sisters lived in an asylum on that hilltop.
All of which makes Munch: Love, Ghosts and Lady Vampires sound like a grim and potentially ghastly way to spend 90 minutes.
And yet, this is an enjoyable film, celebrating a man who wrestled a lot of joy, romance and beauty out of the morass of poverty, madness and those endless winters he had been born into.
Munch was a lover, a thinker, a drinker, and a well-liked and respected man by everyone he actually cared a damn about.
He was a friend to Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg – the three men had a quite endearing habit of falling in love with the same women and then falling out for a while, before painting, writing and composing their own ways back to each other.
Director Michele Mally – who made the fantastic Klimt & Schiele: Eros and Psyche – clearly adores and respects his subject. He assembles a smart selection of talking heads and commentators, but is also happy to let Munch’s writings speak for themselves.
He gives us the facts without trickery or recreation, but still brings the era and the man to life.
A portrait of any artist that is nothing but a chronological slog through the highlights reel is an irritating waste of time, and a film that tries too hard to be clever, at the expense of clarity and narrative, is maybe even worse.
But Mally finds a perfect balance.
His film is conventional and informative when it needs to be, but it swoops and digresses at times, in a way I think the subject might even have appreciated.
If all you know of Munch is The Scream – and maybe his Madonna – then get along and prepare to be impressed by a complex, colourful and likeable life, well told.
Munch: Love, Ghosts and Lady Vampires is screening in select cinemas nationwide.