Critics reviews

The film itself shares nothing of the painter's aesthetic abundance, as it's defined by Pialat's usual austerity, eschewing a non-diegetic soundtrack and limiting camera movement to slight, though significant, reframings. But the film does breathe with exceptional fluidity from shot to shot, with provincial summertime France in 1890 comprehensively recreated if only to contribute lively background texture.

The film still pulses with emotion as all of Pialat's movies do; it's just in a quieter register than something like WE WON'T GROW OLD TOGETHER or A NOS AMOURS.

Another table scene, with diners humming the French folk song "Le temps des cerises"; one of the characters describing her dead child; the piano teacher singing Lakmë in the bar—all these moments combine to create the expressive canvas of Pialat's film, a breathing work of art.

Maurice Pialat's intense, bleak re-creation of the painter's last days begins with his arrival in Auvers to consult the physician Dr. Gachet... Pialat fills the film with iconic Impressionist amusements (dances at riverside cafés, girls at the piano, rowers in straw hats) as well as with the painter's rugged pleasures, including his wild outburst of drunken joy at a Montmartre dance hall, which plays like the celestial flare of a dying star.

The formal aspects of Van Gogh are a demonstration of this liberty. The shots bloom with fluidity. If in one moment, the studied fixity of the camera holds the actors' movements, in the next zooms and pans it coordinates the speed of a chat at the table. Everything exists naturally. The characters exist within reality, they converse with a sincerity that is sometimes brutal. And the beauty is there, raw, inherent to the layers of life in pasty smudges of small precision.

Dutronc's is one of the great performances, coiled yet passive, its sullen calm occasionally breaking into banal violence, but mostly rendered through walking, painting, listening, doubting, thinking thoughts we can only guess at (Dutronc said of Pialat himself, "Like all directors, what's in their head is a secret").

If one can forget about the real Vincent van Gogh while watching Van Gogh--not an easy matter, given the film's title--there is a great deal to admire. The achievements of this film have a great deal to do with the subjects and the ambience of Impressionist paintings, and a branch of French cinema--specifically the one associated with Jean Renoir--that is often identified, for better or worse, with this movement.