Review: Loving Vincent

Films that get a buzz from a showing at a major film festival, is always worth noting down for a possible appointment of checking out a screening of it in the future.

This particular one had my interest when I heard what the story was, and how it was being presented.

The story of Vincent Van Gogh during and after his life has been discussed for quite some time and by many different demographics of all ages.
Also, with it being shown in the style of his paintings I felt that this was a pretty cool way of paying homage to one of the most misunderstood humans of all-time.

But it wasn't until I saw the very start of the film, this was more than just paying homage. When you see at the start of the film how the film was made, your jaw has already dropped before the first images have even emerged on screen.
It turns out to be the first fully painted film. It was first filmed as live-action and the painters used that original footage as a guide to paint every single frame of the film that eventually took six years to make. That is some achievement.

The amount of time effort that went into making this film is astonishing and its end result is a phenomenal achievement. Seeing it reminded me of the Richard Linklater film A Scanner Darkly. While that comparison was not hand-crafted, it was certainly a similar experience.

As for the story, it's perfectly functional detective story that has a similar structure to that of Citizen Kane, which is a pretty safe formula to have whilst showing off these visuals.

The cast is impressive when reading it, and there performances kept this entertaining instead of just being all about the visuals. Douglas Booth continues to go from strength to strength and has becomed a really well developed British talent. There were also solid contributions by Chris O'Dowd, John Sessions, the always great Helen McCrory, Aidan Turnr, Saoirse Ronan and Jerome Flynn.
While he didn't have much dialogue, Robert Gulaczyk did a great job as Vincent Van Gogh. He looked the part, his facial expressions most certainly enhanced any scene he was in, and gave a great mystery to the man himself.

Another aspect that worked really well was the score by Clint Mansell. The style seemed to match the dream-like quality of the imagery and made it a pleasure for the ears as well as the eyes.

While the story doesn't match to the quality of the images, it is still a solid tale that has a winning formula. The imagery is the reason that this ends up being an impressive piece of work. It is all about the visual experience.
Every minute of watching this just kept me in amazement of what I watching was actually happening for real. Seeing his works come to life is quite an experience that needs to be seen on the big screen. I can certainly see this film being used in art classes for many years to come.

Rating: 8/10