Maurice Pialat's van Gogh is not for those who have to have the ear, the fits, the sunflowers, the crows, Gauguin, all that. He is not here the raging legend but (first things first) the living man. The usual things get said about him: that he is rude, disagreeable, quarrelsome, mad. But in fact we see a man who is not all one way, but who can be pleasant, accommodating, accepting, sociable, a van Gogh who, different from other screen van Goghs, does not seem to be always putting on a performance and clamoring for the spotlight. (Very much to the contrary, the most marginal of characters -- servant, piano teacher, prostitute -- come in for brief intimations of depth and feeling and past history.) And as incarnated by Jacques Dutronc, with his slightly encephalitic head and tubercular torso, this is an unprecedentedly sympathetic van Gogh, a less willful and willed van Gogh, a less predestined, prefabricated van Gogh. If there is any transfiguration of the man, it isn't into a member of the cultural pantheon but into a member of the human race. (A highlight: the prolonged glorious precious moment near the end of the movie, and near the end of an all-night bacchanalia at a Paris bordello, when he falls into line, straight-backed, straight-faced, in a mock-military parade-ground formation for a march around the dance floor.) For two and a half hours, the movie flows along with the steadiness and smoothness of a farmland river: very few pockets of turbulence, no precipitous rises and falls, no moments of momentousness. This would be an impressive thing to bring off as a feat of "pure cinema" (framing, cutting, and the rest), but as the chosen cadence for an account of the last couple of months in the truncated life of a celebrated and tormented artist, it achieves a special poignance. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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