Loving Vincent: A Love Letter To Van Gogh
Loving Vincent
Cast: Douglas Booth, Saoirse Ronan, Aidan Turner, Eleanor Tomlinson
Directors: Dorota Koibela and Hugh Welchman
Ratings: 4.5/5
The official synopsis of Loving Vincent reads — “In a story depicted in oil painted animation, a young man comes to the last hometown of Vincent Van Gogh to deliver the troubled artist’s final letter and ends up investigating the artist’s final days.” The movie, which stars Douglas Booth as Armand Roulin in the lead role, follows Roulin as he goes on a journey to deliver Van Gogh’s final letter. Other cast members include Saoirse Ronan (Margaret Gachet), Robert Gulaczyk (Van Gogh), Aidan Turner (Boatman), Chris O’Dowd (Roulin), Jerome Flynn (Gachet) and Eleanor Tomlinson (Adeline Ravoux). They have done a fantastic job to bring the paintings to life and deserve a special mention.
Directed by Dorota Koibela and Hugh Welchman, Loving Vincent is the world’s first fully painted feature film. This achievement is even more impressive given the quality and class of the movie. The paintings really do come to life in the movie. Every frame of the movie is a homage to the great Van Gogh. Each scene is life like with shades of Van Gogh in each of them.
The dialogues, the progression of the story, the use of tonal shifts in color as a narrative tool and beautiful musical scores add layers of emotion to this beautiful, beautiful movie. Loving Vincent, which was the product of the labor of over a hundred painters, is a movie Van Gogh himself would be proud of.
Loving Vincent is a movie of a rare kind, in a sense that it employs the artistic technique first used by the very person it pays homage to. Just a Van Gogh painted “The Starry Night”; Loving Vincent paints the story of Van Gogh. This movie is one of a kind. A movie for everyone and especially for the lovers of art, the lovers of great stories and the outcasts of the society.
Sudarshan Rajbhandari
