Excellent Film
This is an excellent movie. I was fortunate enough to have seen it in the theater in 1990. It was a tiny theater upstairs at the Beverly Center, and there were only 3-4 people there and maybe only 30 seats left to be empty, but bless them for showing so many of these obscure imported films.
Tim Roth is fantastic in this, he can't not be great in anything. I've been a fan of his acting for twenty years, which is why I was so disappointed that the Fox show Lie To Me is so poor.
Paul Rhys and everyone else are very good as well.
I enjoyed the music very much.
To the casual listener, the music is odd and all over the place, but that is exactly what makes it appropriate. The music is as eccentric and frenetic as the subject himself. The middle of the road Howard Shore/Alan Silvestri scores are too classy and logical for this picture.
I watched this in the theater 20 years ago. I think it was due to one of the many excellent film recommendations from Playboy magazine (like The Crays, etc.). The irony of that magazine is that they refer you to little known films that the Playboy Playmates (or similar chicks) would almost die of boredom if taken to see them!
I just re-watched it in 2010, This TV had it on ArtHouse Sundays, it was three hours with commercials. When I finally saw it, it was a VHS of the broadcast through a digital TV converter box. The print they'd used was dead meat, just totally bled out. What blew me away about it in 1990 was the color, especially the sunflower scene, but what I just saw looked like a poorly stored print from 1968. In the theater, even on the tiny screen upstairs at the Beverly Center, which has to be the smallest screen in the world that someone can pay to see, it was just dazzling.
If you have a good attention span and can watch it with someone who won't be bored, I highly recommend this film.
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The best part of this film, in my view, is the horribly cruel opening scene(s).
Although the film takes place in France in the 1880s, they very cleverly start with some stock video footage a hundred years later from Christie's in 1989, where pompous asses who wouldn't let Van Gogh sleep on their steps are sitting there, raising paddles to bid a Van Gogh painting above ten million (pounds, I think).
The video of the scene just fades out, and the film begins in the most squalid 19th century French shack you could possibly imagine, with country bumpkin Vincent Van Gogh living like a barn animal and his brother---a real city dude---trying to reason with him and get him to stop living this way.
However, even though the 1989 video has faded out, the audio track hasn't, and along with the dialog of two quibbling brothers---one barely sane---you can hear the bidding continue upward "...sixteen million pounds...". This is the only film I know of that is nearly three hours long, but has made its point entirely in the first three minutes.