Loving Vincent

Year of Release:  2017

Director:  Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman

Screenplay:  Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman and Jacek Dehnel

Starring:  Douglas Booth, Robert Gulaczyk, Jerome Flynn, Saoirse Ronan, Helen McCrory, Chris O'Dowd, John Sessions, Eleanor Tomlinson, Aidan Turner

Running Time:  95 minutes

Genre:  Animated, biography

In 1891, one year after the death of artist Vincent van Gogh, postman Joseph Roulin (O'Dowd) asks his son, Armand (Booth), to deliver a letter Vincent had written to his brother, Theo. Armand, who disliked Vincent, reluctantly agrees.  Discovering that Theo himself died  six months after Vincent, Armand continues to the town where Vincent spent his last days, in the hope of finding someone who may be able to send the letter to the van Gogh family.  However, as he learns more about Vincent's troubled life and tragic death, Armand's perspective on him begins to change.

While not achieving much success in his short life, Vincent van Gogh is now recognised as one of the greatest artists of all time.  In this film, the main character Armand is trying to find someone to deliver a letter to,  In doing so he meets a number of Van Gogh's acquaintances, friends and enemies who tell him about the great man's life and personality, and episodes from Vincent's life are depicted in flashback.  The film itself was in production for six years, and employed a team of 125 artists to render each one of it's 65,000 frames as an oil painting on canvas using the same techniques that Van Gogh himself used, and using Van Gogh's paintings as models for each scene and character.  The result is an astonishing achievement, making Van Gogh's art live and breathe.  The film employed a technique called "rotoscoping" in which rather than just supplying the voices for the characters, the actors performed their scenes as if it was live action, and then the artists painted over each frame.  It makes for a striking and slightly disorientating fusion of animation and live action.  At times the film seems unsure as to whether the main focus is Armand's quest or Van Gogh's life, as it begins to become almost a mystery story in it's second half, as Armand becomes convinced that there is more to Van Gogh's death than meets the eye, which threatens to make the film less interesting, as Vincent's friend, Marguerite (played by Saoirse Ronan) says in the film: "You want to know so. much about his death, but what do you know of his life?"  And of course life must always be far more interesting than death.  However, the film dies ultimately manage to pull back from this, and it is a powerful and beautiful experience.

Douglas Booth in Loving Vincent
  

Ammonite

Year of Release:  2020

Director:  Francis Lee

Screenplay:  Francis Lee

Starring:  Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Jones, James McArdle, Alec Secăreanu, Fiona Shaw

Running Time:  118 minutes

Genre:  Romance

In the 1840s, fossil collector and palaeontologist Mary Anning (Winslet) lives in Lyme Regis with her sick, elderly mother Molly (Jones).  To make ends meet, Mary runs a small shop which sells fossils to tourists.  One day, geologist Roderick Murchison (McArdle) visits the shop with his melancholy young wife Charlotte (Ronan).  Murchison hires Mary to teach him about fossil collecting.  Murchison heads abroad for a six week expedition, paying a reluctant Mary to look after Charlotte.  During a morning fossil hunting expedition, Charlotte goes bathing the sea and becomes seriously ill.  The local doctor (Secăreanu) persuades Mary to nurse Charlotte.  Under Mary's care, Charlotte soon recovers, and the two develop a genuine, if tentative friendship, which grows into a passionate romance.

This powerful romantic drama, based on a true story, is one of the best new films that I have come across in a long time.  It's far away from the traditional "chocolate box" period drama.  There is a beauty here but it's of the most savage kind, most of the film is set on the Dorset coast, a cold, windswept place, pounded with rain.  As the grim, weatherbeaten Mary Anning, Kate Winslet has never been better, moving around the coast in the wind and rain, carefully selecting promising rocks, shells and fossils, and wrestling with mud and clay to excavate bones.  She is someone who doesn't say very much, and doesn't let her feelings show, preferring to let her feelings out in the journal she usually has with her, but manages to say a lot with just a glance.  Saoirse Ronan also gives a powerful performance as Charlotte Murchison.  Charlotte is a wealthy, but deeply unhappy woman, convalescing from something that is never quite revealed, with a husband who doesn't really seem to be that bothered with her.  Certainly not bothered enough not to go gallivanting across Europe for six weeks, leaving his ill wife alone with a complete stranger.  Saoirse Ronan's porcelain, fragile beauty works in counterpoint to the cold, rough beauty around her, and the very earthy Mary Anning.  As she grows more accustomed to her environment, Charlotte seems to begin to fit in more.  Mary is uncomfortable in the more genteel society that Charlotte is accustomed to being part of.  They attend a musical evening at the home of the doctor, and Charlotte fits right in with the ladies, while Mary is left alone, at the back, and she leaves early to walk home in the rain.  The romance between the two evolves gradually and convincingly.  As good as the other actors in the film are, especially Gemma Jones as Mary's ailing mother, it is almost a two hander, dominated entirely by the two central performances.  The film does have something to say about the position of women at the time.  It opens in the British Museum where a cleaning woman is scrubbing the floor, when she is rudely told to move out of the way, and a bunch of men put an ichthyosaur fossil that Mary had found on a table, and erase Mary's name off the accompanying card for the display and replace it with a man's name, and when Mary visits the British Museum she walks through a portrait gallery full entirely of portraits of white men in wigs.  Without wishing to give the ending away, I will say I was left wanting more.  It's rare to want a film to be longer than it is, in fact most of the time it's quite the opposite, but here I was left wanting to know more about these women and what becomes of them.  The tone moves between cold, bleak life, and the glow of friendship. love and the heat of passion, light and dark together.  

Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan in Ammonite
            

Little Women

Year of Release:  2019
Director:  Greta Gerwig
Screenplay:  Greta Gerwig, based on the novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Starring:  Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet
Running Time:  135 minutes
Genre:  Period drama

Set in the 1860s the film follows the four March sisters:  Responsible Meg (Watson) the oldest of the four; stubborn and fiery Jo (Ronan), an aspiring writer; kind, shy and musical Beth (Scanlen) and the youngest of the four, Amy (Pugh), an aspiring painter. 

This is one of several adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel, which I have never read, and I have never seen any of the other adaptations of it, and so I cannot say how faithful or not this film is to it's source.  The film introduces us to the March sisters as adults, and moves back and forth between their childhood and their adult lives.  The film is beautifully made with some ravishing images, and impeccably played by a very strong cast.  After having made a splash with her directorial debut Lady Bird, this marks Greta Gerwig as one of the most promising new directors working today.  The film has a large cast of characters and moves between a number of different storylines and time frames, with nary a misstep.  It also successfully balances period detail with a contemporary relevance.

Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women