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At Eternity’s Gate
****
Dir: Julian Schnabel
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen
(USA/UK, 12A, 1hr 45mins)
In At Eternity’s Gate, the slipping in and out of languages quickly becomes a nice pace at which to follow Van Gogh’s journey – and it is a deeply personal one. Moving at a steady pace overall, the long, drawn-out scenes dispersed throughout seemingly intend to evoke stagnation and pause in the artist’s life, particularly when he arrives in Arles to paint – a city on the Rhône river in Provence. In contrast to the ephemeral existence of real flowers, Van Gogh wants to keep them alive forever in his work. So he stops, and makes serene journeys into nature, painting from life – the practice that defined impressionism. Simply clothed in cotton carrying his materials on his back, in every one of these scenes the light is cinematically astounding. The camerawork is seamless and purposeful. In its storytelling, it has managed to pull off a mighty amount of emotive power through pure visuals alone.
At one point in Arles, a group of schoolchildren come up to Van Gogh; “Why are you just painting the roots? Do you find these beautiful?” they ask.
“Yes, I do,” he says.
“In school, we are told to draw the sky and trees and leaves,” they say stubbornly. The audience is brought along with Van Gogh and his struggle in challenging the art world’s ideology – how misunderstood and chronically in pain the man felt, regardless of also being severely ill.
Children throw rocks at him – teachers, restaurateurs, civilians shout at him. At Eternity’s Gate depicts the rocky terrain that was living inside of the mind of Van Gogh – but also how he learns to tackle it, in part, through painting.
But what really speaks louder than any other storyline is the role that love played in Vincent’s life, and the relationship with his brother. When committed to a psychiatric hospital, Theo requests that his brother receives two hundred and fifty francs from him monthly in exchange for one of his paintings. “It will benefit Vincent greatly,” he says. In 80 days, Vincent paints 75 paintings. When Theo lies with him, Vincent mumbles, “I feel so well with you lying next to me…so well I wish I could die like this.”
The power of constant financial and emotional support – Theo was a successful and influential art dealer at the time – so he could afford to – is well depicted here. The power of love, and what’s more, understanding. For some reason, Theo just understood what Vincent needed to make art. And the result was something far from ephemeral.
words Ruth Seavers