Post by breckjensen on Sept 27, 2017 12:18:03 GMT
“There’s no more face or landscape worth painting here,” says Paul Gauguin (Vincent Cassel) in Paris just before he leaves for Oceania in French writer-director Edouard Deluc’s Gauguin (Gauguin: Voyage de Tahiti). Indeed, a lot of the post-Impressionist painter’s most famous works were still ahead of him and Deluc at least avoids trying to give an overview of the artist’s entire life, instead concentrating on just his first voyage to French Polynesia, which occurred between 1891 and 1893.
But even so, the strikingly shot feature, a veritable shallow-focus feast, tries to explore a vast array of topics, including but certainly not limited to nature, colonialism, religion, sexuality and art. This dilutes the film’s focus, with Gauguin also constantly struggling to make money and to keep up his end of an unlikely (and fictional) love triangle.
A bearded and emaciated Cassel throws himself into the lead with typical abandon and his committed performance is certainly a selling point. But even though the feature as a work of fiction was decently received locally, it was attacked on several fronts as a biopic, with most notably the film’s refusal to admit outright that Gauguin’s first wife was, by his own admission, only 13 when they married, a sore point for some French outlets. Perhaps expecting a similar fallout with the international press, the pic bypassed the fall festival corridor and was unceremoniously released in French theaters at the tail end of September. It has already been sold to several other territories, including Japan and Germany, and will probably work best for audiences who know Gauguin’s name and works but not much about his life.
But even so, the strikingly shot feature, a veritable shallow-focus feast, tries to explore a vast array of topics, including but certainly not limited to nature, colonialism, religion, sexuality and art. This dilutes the film’s focus, with Gauguin also constantly struggling to make money and to keep up his end of an unlikely (and fictional) love triangle.
A bearded and emaciated Cassel throws himself into the lead with typical abandon and his committed performance is certainly a selling point. But even though the feature as a work of fiction was decently received locally, it was attacked on several fronts as a biopic, with most notably the film’s refusal to admit outright that Gauguin’s first wife was, by his own admission, only 13 when they married, a sore point for some French outlets. Perhaps expecting a similar fallout with the international press, the pic bypassed the fall festival corridor and was unceremoniously released in French theaters at the tail end of September. It has already been sold to several other territories, including Japan and Germany, and will probably work best for audiences who know Gauguin’s name and works but not much about his life.
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