Van Gogh - Maurice Pialat (1991)

This is Maurice Pialat's masterpiece, one of the best French films ever ! Unlike the title may induce, it's not a Van Gogh "classic" biography as Pialat only shows the last three months of the painter's life, from his arrival in Auvers sur Oise until his suicide. The picture is constantly moving, intelligent, funny and masterfully photographed (some sequences along the river look like Renoirs's paintings). It's as much a movie about Pialat himself as about Van Gogh.

Van Gogh has the same flaws (or if not flaws, at least issues) that make Pialat’s films often difficult to watch – the lack of traditional narrative structure or plot and the fact that the films are made up of extremely dislikeable characters inflicting brutality upon each other. At the same time, this is also the virtue of Pialat’s work and the strength of this approach is that it lends Van Gogh an incredible authenticity and naturalism that you will not find in any comparable biography or documentary of the artist, taking us closer to the real man – not letting us observe him from a distance, but actually being witness to the man’s serious personal problems and to the brilliance of his artistic talent. On this last point, I’m not convinced that the director is successful at showing the man as an artist and quite how the demons that drove him led to the creation of great art, but then that is perhaps a tall order. Despite its difficulties however, this is just as compelling a film as any of Pialat’s work, and probably one of his best.