Boner M
09-28-2008, 12:16 PM
Haven't written a review in a while and have some time to kill. Here goes.
http://auteurs.s3.amazonaws.com/notebook/Image%20series/Van%20Gogh/1.jpg
Pialat's worldview is so casually bleak and unceremonious, that I'm always puzzled as to why I feel so weirdly edified and elated after I finish his films. Life is little more than a bunch of stuff that happens to you, and accordingly, his disjointed, superficially naturalistic scenes disperse narrative information elliptically or not at all, rife with haphazard and irrational behaviour, where even the most dramatic moments register with roughly the same amount of immediacy as the mundane ones. A typical scene involves someone smiling at something or someone offscreen; we don't know what they're smiling at, or why their smiling, so the only way for us to navigate our way through the moment is to smile along. When the source is located, it doesn't seem to matter anymore. We're here, this is really happening, and who cares about why.
The Pialat approach used within the biopic idiom, as exercised here, is thus predictably iconoclastic. I haven't seen Lust For Life, but it's easy to see this as a pale-faced rebuke to the standard biopic formula; instead of the usual histrionics and reductive three-act structure, we get what is essentially a string of largely speculated scenes of the quotidian - rapturously photographed and astonishingly tactile scenes, but quotidian nonetheless. The attractive period decor and epic running time remain, but the expected melodrama is muted. What is truly striking about the film is how Pialat manages to sidestep both the cliches of the biopic as well as the cliches of the anti-biopic. There are scenes of the artist's doubt and questioning his place in society, but Pialat's eye is too doggedly earthbound for Van Gogh to register as a martyr. Pialat's history as a painter-turned-filmmaker is a key to his fascination with Van Gogh, but even without the foreknowledge, his painterly style and texture is enough to clue us in. Indeed, the scenes where Van Gogh discusses his methods - and their similarity to what Pialat is doing with the plastics of the medium - come across as jarringly blunt amongst such inscrutable surroundings, but this bluntness and explicitness of intention seems appropriate. Once we acknowledge Van Gogh as the Pialat surrogate, we accept the film as a construct, a vessel for the artist to discuss his art and worldview.
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
To its credit, the film seems defiantly lackadaisical in its desire to educate or 'prove' anything in the conventional sense about art in a historical context. There's a lot of momentum, and a palpable sense of the bodies in motion, but little to respond to emotionally as the film remains largely observational on a dramatic level - in this respect, Pialat's constant Cassavetes comparison is a little off-base. Van Gogh is even often absent from the frame in the scenes where he figures, or blurring into the collective whole. A ten minute stretch that coldly depicts the artist's last days still manages to find a generous amount of time for his mother's toe-stubbing in the moments where we expect to see the family grieving. We leave on a curious, ironic note that puts everything into perspective. A man paints the estate where Van Gogh lay on his deathbed, and asks a woman passing by about her relation to him - "he was a friend". Cut to black, cue triumphant classical music. In Pialat's universe, it's the best thing you can be.
http://auteurs.s3.amazonaws.com/notebook/Image%20series/Van%20Gogh/1.jpg
Pialat's worldview is so casually bleak and unceremonious, that I'm always puzzled as to why I feel so weirdly edified and elated after I finish his films. Life is little more than a bunch of stuff that happens to you, and accordingly, his disjointed, superficially naturalistic scenes disperse narrative information elliptically or not at all, rife with haphazard and irrational behaviour, where even the most dramatic moments register with roughly the same amount of immediacy as the mundane ones. A typical scene involves someone smiling at something or someone offscreen; we don't know what they're smiling at, or why their smiling, so the only way for us to navigate our way through the moment is to smile along. When the source is located, it doesn't seem to matter anymore. We're here, this is really happening, and who cares about why.
The Pialat approach used within the biopic idiom, as exercised here, is thus predictably iconoclastic. I haven't seen Lust For Life, but it's easy to see this as a pale-faced rebuke to the standard biopic formula; instead of the usual histrionics and reductive three-act structure, we get what is essentially a string of largely speculated scenes of the quotidian - rapturously photographed and astonishingly tactile scenes, but quotidian nonetheless. The attractive period decor and epic running time remain, but the expected melodrama is muted. What is truly striking about the film is how Pialat manages to sidestep both the cliches of the biopic as well as the cliches of the anti-biopic. There are scenes of the artist's doubt and questioning his place in society, but Pialat's eye is too doggedly earthbound for Van Gogh to register as a martyr. Pialat's history as a painter-turned-filmmaker is a key to his fascination with Van Gogh, but even without the foreknowledge, his painterly style and texture is enough to clue us in. Indeed, the scenes where Van Gogh discusses his methods - and their similarity to what Pialat is doing with the plastics of the medium - come across as jarringly blunt amongst such inscrutable surroundings, but this bluntness and explicitness of intention seems appropriate. Once we acknowledge Van Gogh as the Pialat surrogate, we accept the film as a construct, a vessel for the artist to discuss his art and worldview.
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
To its credit, the film seems defiantly lackadaisical in its desire to educate or 'prove' anything in the conventional sense about art in a historical context. There's a lot of momentum, and a palpable sense of the bodies in motion, but little to respond to emotionally as the film remains largely observational on a dramatic level - in this respect, Pialat's constant Cassavetes comparison is a little off-base. Van Gogh is even often absent from the frame in the scenes where he figures, or blurring into the collective whole. A ten minute stretch that coldly depicts the artist's last days still manages to find a generous amount of time for his mother's toe-stubbing in the moments where we expect to see the family grieving. We leave on a curious, ironic note that puts everything into perspective. A man paints the estate where Van Gogh lay on his deathbed, and asks a woman passing by about her relation to him - "he was a friend". Cut to black, cue triumphant classical music. In Pialat's universe, it's the best thing you can be.