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The look of the beholder follows a staggering, erring figure along a path, sunbeams break through the foliage of the poplars on the wayside. Everything is wrapped in warm light, but the picture is blurry, out of focus, tilts again and again. Then again, the camera captures the textures of stones, plants, insects very tightly and clearly, or swings into the expanse of the horizon.

And again and again, the focus is on the face of this man, frozen in his deep blue eyes, the furrows and wrinkles, the desperate look. It is the eyes of Vincent van Gogh, a searching, walking, unleashed artist, through whom we can simultaneously look into the distance and into his soul.

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"Van Gogh - On the threshold to eternity": Finally light

Later, Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac) will criticize his artist friend Van Gogh for his hasty, searching work. He overpaints his pictures so often that at some point they would be more like a sculpture than a painting. Precisely this technique is used by Julian Schnabel, who himself is known as a painter and made his film debut in 1996 with the artist portrait "Basquiat", in "Van Gogh - On the threshold to eternity": He puts layer after layer, scatters rags, wipes them gone again. He reflects the manic way of working of the Post-Impressionist - sometimes subtle, sometimes over-clear, but always captivating.

This sky, these colors

Similarly, in 2007 Schnabel staged the memoirs "Diving Bell and Butterflies" by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby suffered from a stroke on the so-called locked-in syndrome and could only move one eyelid. From the limited field of vision of his main character Schnabel turned a large part of his film and visualized painfully real the feeling of the protagonist, the almost absolute isolation from the outside world.

Also in van Gogh Schnabel is interested in the subjective perception of the figure, not for the already known biographical data. Many others did that before him, such as Vincente Minnelli in 1956 with Kirk Douglas as van Gogh or Andrew Hutton in "Van Gogh - Painted with Words" with Benedict Cumberbatch in 2010. Recently, "Loving Vincent" even had an animated film, a filmography completely painted in Van Gogh's style.

"Van Gogh - On the threshold to eternity"
France 2018
Director: Julian Schnabel
Screenplay: Julian Schnabel, Louise Kugelberg, Jean-Claude Carrière
Performers: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric
Production: Iconoclast
Distribution: DCM Filmdistrubition
Length: 111 minutes
FSK: from 6 years
Start: 18th April 2019

Schnabel, who also wrote the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg, focuses on the creative process of the painter's last two years. These are the years of failure in the gray, cold and blase Paris and Van Gogh's subsequent escape to Arles in Provence - financially supported by his intimately connected brother Theo (Rupert Friend).

Also there he first finds shelter in a cold draughty room, and even there he meets with incomprehension to exclusion. But when it gets warmer, he finds in the landscape, in the blazing sun, the blue sky, the rich colors, the light that he needs for his art - everyone knows the sunflower and landscape paintings that were created in this creative period.

Born to paint

Benoît Delhomme captures the search with extreme wide-angle, sometimes with a nervous hand-held camera, following van Gogh as he trudges through the landscape with his easel on his back and the straw hat on his head. This is as sharp as kitsch, but Schnabel has pictures of dreariness cut against it, such as cold, gray ruins in which van Gogh winds desperately.

"I consider myself as a man in exile," says the painter in conversation with a priest (Mads Mikkelsen). It is a key scene in which the clergyman - even full of incomprehension - wants to find out why van Gogh believes he is a painter. He was born to paint, van Gogh says, and later adds in one of the many voice-overs: "Maybe God has made me a painter for people who are not yet born."

This, like his understanding of nature, has something sublime and, as a Christian promise of salvation, is also a pretty reminder of Dafoe's magnificent depiction in Scorsese's 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ.

In the video: The trailer for "Van Gogh - On the threshold to eternity"

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DCM

Although Dafoe is much older than van Gogh at the age of 63, he died at age 37 under mysterious circumstances. But with his vulnerable vitality, he makes Schnabel's hauntingly unusual and wonderful view of the painter and his work possible in the first place.