Cinema is already in itself a complex artistic expression. It is even more so when dealing with other arts. If we then add that the director is known more for his pictorial production than for his works on the big screen, his reflection becomes even more complicated. This is the case with Van Gogh – On the threshold of eternity, this week's film just released in theaters, signed by Julian Schanabel, awarded the Coppa Volpi at the recent Venice Film Festival.
In view of the foregoing, we will try, as far as possible, to stick to the film product only, trying not to be influenced by its content or subject. Let's start with the director. Schnabel has titles to his credit that have had important international awards: he made his debut with Basquiat in 1996, to get to the Palme d'Or in Cannes with The diving suit and the butterfly. It is an author intended for an educated public, a director attentive to the world of figurative arts, always in search of new languages and original forms of expression. Precisely with this film on the life of the great Dutch painter, he proposes his own way of using the hand-held camera, subjectively, which is not exactly new as far as it tries to offer a more marked thickness to the framed characters. This cannot and should not be the only stylistic feature of a film that faces an art giant. From what we have seen, it appears to us as a choice that is not entirely justified: it appears more of an aesthetic sophistication than an enrichment of the sequences. For everything else, including incomprehensible cuts in black, it almost seems like wanting to compete, be in competition, with van Gogh in the proposition of suggestive images. Yet, the material, the ideas to face the life of the Dutch painter there are enough.
Schnabel seems to want to present himself above all as an artist rather than a director, a figurative artist, and pays close attention to the quality of the shots, the chromatic tone, the balance of the spaces. Anything is possible, including the so-called “contamination” but they are different professions that it is not always possible to mix them together. From this point of view the film is interesting, not compelling. It fails to give the sensation of a stimulating approach, capable of soliciting even an inexperienced spectator the pleasure of entering the difficult, complicated world of a great protagonist of modern painting. The script is often slow and tiring to follow.
The biopic genre in recent times it has been giving excellent results in terms of audience in cinemas, also thanks to the happy experience of the "film event's audience”: see the recent Caravaggio as well as the one on Monet. From this point of view, products like this Van Gogh are welcome, which in any case bring and bring spectators closer to the world of art. However, supporting this direction requires a more attentive and respectful creative and narrative effort for those who go to cinemas and not just galleries.
