With Love, Van Gogh could not have been made were it not for the amazing love of directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman for the painter, who with his team created 65,000 Van Gogh-style paintings – an easy feat. However, this is the best way to tell the story of an artist so peculiar and that, even today, is seen with much mystery and adulation.
Vincent van Gogh’s career has never given him any success while alive. With love for the less fortunate, and having been a priest for a small time, he tried to live in the same way as the poor, painting them as he saw them. Always helped by his brother financially, who believed in his abilities, Van Gogh’s paintings only gained more peculiarity over time, influencing the modernist movement much later, or even creating his own movement, being so different from any painter.
His paintings are rich in color and dynamism. Each trait is clearly exposed in his works and, along with the vibrant colors, make his paintings appear impulsive and have a high degree of expressionism. But it is precisely this high degree of impulsiveness and expression that gave their drawings a great dynamism. Although they are only paintings, it is easy to feel their movement. It’s as if his canvases were alive. And it’s also this quality that makes them sweat with so much emotion.
However, these same qualities are what prevented the Dutch artist from gaining success while living. At first, he was seen as crazy or eccentric. His paintings, so different from other traditional ones of the time, were considered rubbish and were often found as packages of cheap objects. Even so, many decades later, Van Gogh is rediscovered and, with the difficult and peculiar artistic trait, he becomes one of the most famous painters in the world.
There were several attempts to tell his story. Even the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa tried without much success. Such a personality could only appear on the big screen with its own artistic traits, and this is exactly what the directors of Com Amor, Van Gogh do.
All the people he painted, including public servants, postmen, doctors and farmers, come to life in the film. Everyone participates in a plot that tries to understand the death of the painter. The plot shows the son of a postman traveling to deliver a letter to Van Gogh’s brother, who ends up arriving in Auvers-sur-Oise, the French city where the artist died. Interacting with the people Van Gogh designed, memories of a passionate genius for his profession and hardworking are emphasized (the directors try not to get too close to the painter’s more negative qualities like his tormented heart that led to his suicide or even his fame of insane).
Although the hard work of the filmmakers is clearly seen, especially in the early minutes of With Love, Van Gogh, it is the mystery that revolves the life of the painter who gives the film its success. The figure of Van Goh is elusive and he appears little. However, this only makes him grow through the tales of those who painted him. Here the painter and the painting finally appear together.
(article translated from the original version in portuguese, by Google Translate)