Loving Vincent (2017)

[baumer]

Do your thing

[Avatree]

 

 

totally bizarre film. Thought it was going to be a biopic but the film is set after Van Gogh's death. So its basically a detective story in which a character that we dont care about, walks around a town interviewing other characters that we don't care about, who give different versions of what happened the day of Van Gogh's death. None of this gives us any insight into who Van Gogh was. A character telling us that "Oh it wasn't in a field, I heard a gunshot come from the barn" is not interesting information. None of the characters stories give us virtually any information about Van Gogh.

 

So with Van Gogh, despite being the centre of the plot, pretty much ignored, the film is much more interested in telling this detective / whodunnit and featuring these various personalities. But on that front it is an utter failure too. There are no dimensions to any of the "characters", in fact I can't really call them characters, they're just voices that read out some information. I read a review that said the characters speak in "Wikipedic dialogue" which is accurate. They just convey information and there is no feeling to any of the dialogue. I think this might be because it's written by people who don't speak English as their first language (the filmmakers are all from Poland) but regardless, it doesn't work. All the dialogue is very clunky. It's videogame writing.

 

The main character talks to various people and they all tell a piece of dialogue that involves a flashback, in the same format, this happens like 10 times and that's the whole movie. It is extremely boring and is a terrible detective movie.

 

The only saving grace is the animation. The rotoscoping effect is impressive but it doesn't feel like a painting when the characters are interacting with each other. The backgrounds are great (they were original painting) but the rotoscoping stuff is just gimmicky.

 

I knew nothing about van gogh before I saw this movie, and I now still know nothing.

[Morieris]

A very pretty RPG.
 

I think the character animation for Douglass Booth's character is astonishing, and the likeness is impressive. Must be weird to look better as a painting than IRL.

 

Now I'm not super knowledgeable on Van Gogh's life, but I never thought there was speculation over his death to this degree. I was kept mildly interested because of how nice it looked, not because I cared about the story or the "mystery", because that was the last thing I can say about this film.