Van Gogh.

The late Marvin Mudrick once wrote that "for the mass media...Poe, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec are spectacularly visible, they are public images congenial to a visual medium .... Poe's dank tarns and ghoul-haunted baggy eyes, Toulouse-Lautrec's half-sized legs, the piece of Van Gogh's ear that he sliced off and carried as a gift to one of the girls at the brothel .... TV and the movies don't make their choices without a reason."

I wish Mudrick had lived long enough to see Maurice Pialet's Van Gogh. If he had, he might have shaken his head and growled. "Never trust a French director with a public image."

Those public images may be bequests to the movies but then they are reshaped by the movies. And by biographies, biographical novels, poems, plays, TV plays, songs, comic strips, et al. For instance, the Lincoln who roams my imagination is a composite creation by Benjamin Thomas, Walt Whitman, Shelby Foote, Lord Charnwood, Aaron Copland, Carl Sandburg, Henry Fonda, Walter Huston, Raymond Massey, and the Classics Illustrated comic book I read when I was nine. These contributions to my personal Lincoln may jar and jostle but there is also some overlap, some agreement. Some Lincolns stand majestically erect, some gangle, none is short. Some are easy in the company of women, some are shy, none is a Don Juan. Fonda may play it coy and cagey in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln and the hero of Gore Vidal's novel may be downright Machiavellian, but no Lincoln of biography or fiction can be a blackguard or a dunce. There is a sort of tonal center to the image of each famous historical character and each biographer, novelist, and moviemaker strays from that center at his peril.

Up to now, up to the release of Pialet's Van Gogh, this has held true for moviemakers creating fictionalized accounts of the Dutch painter's life. Both Vincent Minnelli and Robert Altman boldly juggle the facts of Van Gogh's life but without fundamentally tampering with the image of Van Gogh as the Great Martyr of Art that has been with us for a century.

In Minnelli's Lust for Life (script by Norman Corwin from Irving Stone's novel), Kirk Douglas's Vincent is all crouched, pleading fury, a fury caused by his love--for individuals, for humankind, for art--being constantly rejected. He may lust for life but life boots him up the backside. Whether denouncing the stuffy clergymen who forbid him to minister to miners, or on all fours to cousin Kai, pleading for her love, or imploring smug tough guy Gauguin for a little understanding, Douglas's Van Gogh is kin to all those misunderstood kids of fifties movies like Rebel without a Cause or East of Eden. He's James Dean with a beard. The image most people take away from this movie is that of the bandaged, self-mutilated Van Gogh thrusting his face out of a window and screaming at the jeering crowd below: "Leave me alone! Leave me alone!" In the decade of The Organization Man, Minnelli made of Vincent the Disorganized Man, too clumsy to fit in, too sensitive to love. But oh, how he would love to be loved ! This is a partial view, soft-centered and masochistic, for it leaves out the Vincent who drove brother Theo nearly nuts with whining and needling, kicked one of his asylum attendants in the stomach and offered to give one of his analysts "a really close shave" when he surprised the poor doctor at his morning ablutions. Yet Lust for Life also has a firm purchase on its corner of the Van Gogh story. After all, Vincent was a self-made pariah, constantly yearning to love, yet constantly insuring by his actions that love would never come to pass. Lust for Life may be a bit too simplistic, but it is an honorable tearjerker.

Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo (script by Julian Mitchel) presents another partial but valid view of the painter. This Vincent is an angry, even ferocious young man. The film begins with his decision at age twenty-seven to dedicate himself to art. Unlike Lust for Life, this film makes no reference to the painter's early religious aspirations so we can't place his artistic zeal in the context of a larger zeal to serve humanity. For all we know of this Van Gogh's aesthetic credo, he might be an exponent of art-for-art's-sake, a movement quite popular in Vincent's day but firmly rejected by the Dutchman, who thought of his painting as one tool among many to enlighten and comfort all people, not just the aesthetically sophisticated. (The Minnelli film is gratifyingly clear about this.) This Van Gogh is stuck in a prolonged adolescence but, unlike Kirk Douglas, Tim Roth eschews pathos and emphasizes the artist's abrasiveness. This Van Gogh is of the race of Rimbaud, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, and all other artists who conceive of their work as a gob of spit expectorated in the direction of the bourgeoisie. This portrayal narrows our view of Van Gogh as much as Lust for Life does, but it also has some insight into a man who was at times bitter, even blasphemous, though not so consistently as Altman's film would have it.

Watching the opening scenes of Pialet's Van Gogh, you wouldn't dream of calling the movie's hero tormented or an artistic martyr or even Dutch. When Jacques Dutronc as Vincent steps off the train in Auvers, the town where his therapist, Dr. Gachet, lives, he looks the very model of a mature, sophisticated Frenchman. A youngish Charles de Gaulle in profile, wellspoken, decently appareled, easy in his approach to strangers but, as is the way of all mature Frenchmen (at least in movies), weary and wary of life and love. He has the languid grace of one of Colette's playboys.

And what about Van Gogh's famous enthusiasm about art, argumentativeness, and volatility? Dutronc doesn't even raise an eyebrow when Dr. Gachet's daughter, dissatisfied with his portrait of her, gives him a lengthy tongue lashing. And Van Gogh's lack of ease with women? Dutronc no sooner finds lodging in an inn than he is roguishly putting his hand up the serving maid's skirt. This Vincent consorts with prostitutes, as did the real Vincent, but they are gorgeous, graceful creatures, not the wretches that Vincent, a wellspring of non-stop pity, favored. And soon Dutronc-Vincent is also sleeping with Dr. Gachet's daughter, Marguerite, even daring to possess her on the empty passenger car of the train they have taken to and from all-night revels in Vincent's favorite Paris bistro where he has just drunk Toulouse-Lautrec under the table and taken part in a line dance with the gusto of a Gallic Zorba.

Now just who is this guy? A completely fictional character who just happens to be called Vincent Van Gogh?

Well, why not? Why should we hold Pialet answerable to countless biographies and pseudo-biographies? Isn't he to be allowed to sculpt his own fictional figure out of the raw materials of facts?

But suppose the facts left in Pialet's fiction (for he hasn't dispensed with biography altogether) are rendered preposterous by his inventions? For instance, Pialet's Van Gogh is, after all, a mental patient. So what is the nature of his psychological torment? This movie doesn't give us a clue. There's no examination of the artist's familial relations or religious crises or anything else that brought him to the point where he needs psychological help.

In this film we occasionally see Vincent's canvasses. Is there any way this innovative, volcanic art could have been accomplished by this perpetually laid-back guy that Dutronc portrays? No way. Even more out of place are the few acts of self-destructiveness we see Vincent commit, and most out of place is the suicide. When Van Gogh walks out of that famous wheatfield with his self-inflicted gunshot wound draining his life away, nothing that we have seen has led up to it.

To be fair, that may be Pialet's very point. He seems to be telling us that speculation about the roots of Vincent's behavior, perhaps any person's behavior, is fruitless. Every human being is a mysterious surface and nobody can penetrate that surface. All portrayals of Vincent as martyr, as wild man, as holy man, as near-psychotic or saint, are merely reflections of our own need to romanticize and to pigeonhole those whose actions disturb us. Readers of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault will love this movie.

And Pialet also draws a bead on one other cherished notion: the feeling that artists, as the antennae of the human race, are more deserving of attention than the rest of humanity. In the final scenes of Van Gogh, the dying Vincent looks up from his pillow and asks Theo for something to drink. The younger brother leaves the bedroom and, upon returning with the refreshment, finds Vincent dead. No last words, no pathetic farewell, none of Kirk Douglas's "Oh, Theo, I want to go home" or Tim Roth's "Could I have my pipe?" No death scene at all. But, a few seconds later, we are with Van Gogh's landlady in her kitchen and a misplaced board falls on her foot. Screams, yells, scolding, household panic, high drama, virtual Armageddon! It's clear what Pialet is after here: the drama we see in any great man's life is the drama we have retrospectively created for it, and it is we, the consumers of sentiment and grand passion, who insist that such lives come to a satisfying conclusion with a moving death tableau. But, if a board falls on a landlady's foot and she makes a godalmighty fuss about it, why is that less dramatic, less worthy of our attention than the unseen death of an obscure Dutch painter in a little upstairs room of a seedy inn?

As befits the director's aims, Pialet's style, apparently influenced by Robert Bresson's, is a model of dispassion, even detachment. His camera stays in the middle distance--no odd angles, no unusual editing, no flamboyant pans. The color camerawork is so subdued that it reproduced itself in my mind as black-and-white a few hours after I saw the film. (And this for a movie about a painter who wanted each color on his canvasses to cry out!) One bland two-shot follows another. The natural backgrounds, though potentially of great beauty, aren't used for dramatic effect. The various dialogues, like the conversations of our everyday lives, mix trivia with crucial matters but in such a way that the momentous is usually subdued by the trivial. The acting, though competent, is so naturalistic that no glances or vocal inflections linger in the memory. The overall effect is flat, anti-dramatic, often boring.

Pialet's Van Gogh drives us away from its hero, blocks our preconceptions of what Vincent was like but without offering us a substitute conception that makes sense. This film isn't a case of a filmmaker cautioning us not to understand a complex man too quickly. Pialet isn't warning us; he's snubbing us. He has made a Vincent Van Gogh movie that tells us we can't know