Review of Loving Vincent (2017) by Clem666 — 21 Feb 2021

There is absolutely no doubt of it: the visuals are extraordinary thanks to all these artists who have been working on this movie for several years. And I speak about visuals in general because this is a short way to mean that lighting is wonderful, details are omnipresent, movements are gorgeous and colours are meaningful. Those artists have successfully recreated some of the major Van Gogh's paintings and managed to have them included impressively in the movie.

Despite these points 'Loving Vincent' also could have been way different and maybe so much better than what it actually is. Only speaking about the scenario, all this project does is to add flashbacks to flashbacks to try to solve a passed potential crime. Why does this have to be so close to the investigation and crime category of movies? This totally ruins the thing! You could have made it so much more biographical, closer to Van Gogh's daily life. All we hear about him comes from people speaking about him: 'I heard this...', 'I saw that...', ... And the movie underlines the fact that everyone has a different opinion about Van Gogh and the events of his death.

The end especially could have been so much better. The last thing we see and hear is the opinion of Dr. Gachet, the main doctor of Van Gogh. And the movie ends in a certain way that we want to believe this last testimony. However it is just another opinion and we had a lot of them during the feauture. So for me this is totally an open ending that tries to erase a lot of what we saw before. The conclusion is so easy: 'he killed himself in a weird way because he was totally crazy'. And after all we have been through it is such a lame conclusion! A few inconsistencies in the movie doesn't match at all with this end.

So I want the end of this review to be far more mixed than the movie end. I think as I said that this movie is incredible by the way it has been produced and the way it looks. But I found that the stroytelling appears to be really poor to me. A lot of characters are badly introduced or unintelligible (as the simple dummy boy at the end). Not bad but could have easily been better.