| Overview: | VAN GOGH deals with the last three months of the painter's life. It was shot in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small village 30 kilometres outside Paris where Van Gogh actually spent the last three months of his life (May-July 1890). He had just spent a year at the asylum in Saint Remy and although still suffering from depression he was in better health. His three months in Auvers-sur-Oise was a time of great creative activity. He painted a canvas every day spent in Auvers and some of his greatest masterpieces.
It was there, on July 29 1980, that the 37-year-old Dutch painter died of a self inflicted gunshot wound.
Pialat, whose portrait manages to avoid the clichés of the usual biopic, takes a subjective view and shows Van Gogh as different and difficult. But he is less concerned in dealing with historical facts than with achieving an emotional truth and in this he has succeeded brilliantly. 'Pialat's real interest is not Van Gogh' explained producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier. 'His focus is the artist - his place in the world and his fate to be unloved, abandoned and ultimately a tragic figure'.
Described as a film about creation, love or the absence of love, Pialat's Van Gogh is an 'ordinary' man, anguished and neglected. He is also a victim misunderstood, mistreated, unappreciated and unloved, the victim of a philistine age.
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