Gauguin - Voyage de Tahiti (2017)
Directed by Edouard Deluc

Film Review

Gauguin - Voyage de Tahiti is an ambitious second feature from director Édouard Deluc, whose debut offering Mariage à Mendoza met with a lukewarm reception from the critics in 2012.  Inspired by Noa Noa, a travel diary written by Paul Gauguin in 1893, it concentrates on the artist's first visit to Tahiti in 1891 and shows his development from a conventional Parisian artist to one of the great post-impressionists through the influence of his discovered South Sea Paradise.  To its author's credit, the film does not pretend to be a full biopic although it does perhaps attempt to cover too much ground, half-heartedly roping in several other themes (including colonialism and religion) in a way that takes away the focus from its core subject.

Films about great artists are two a penny, with few living up to the excellence of Vincente Minnelli's Van Gogh epic Lust for Life (1956).  Deluc's film is nearer to Gilles Bourdos's Renoir (2012), a vibrantly filmed but dramatically slight attempt to present the life of the impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir.  As in Bourdos's self-consciously arty film, Deluc is more concerned with visual impact than narrative substance, so whilst the film can hardly fail to impress with its stunningly sensual location photography, it feels somewhat lacking in content.

What holds the film together is a totally committed performance from lead actor Vincent Cassel, who brings an astonishing sense of reality to his uninhibited portrayal of Gauguin.  Despite this tour de force character turn, the artist remains something of a closed book to us - we never see inside his soul and understand just what motivated him to change his art so radically after a dismal start to his career in France.  Instead, we see Gauguin not as a fully developed individual, but as the archetypal free spirit in search of the absolute, nothing more.  The secondary characters are even more diffuse and the only relationship that rings true is the one that the artist develops with his amiable doctor, convincingly played by Malik Zidi.

On its release in France, Gauguin - Voyage de Tahiti was widely criticised for the liberties it takes with historical fact.  One major bone of contention is that it disregards the fact that Gauguin's Polynesian model Tehura was only thirteen when he took her as his wife (as was the custom on Tahiti at the time).  A reluctance to get sucked into the deadly mire of paedophilia is no doubt what led the film's authors to play it safe, but in doing so they undermine the film's credibility somewhat - particularly when there are so many other historical inaccuracies.  It would seem that even in these permissive times cinema audiences cannot be told the full story of Paul Gauguin.

Film Synopsis

In 1891, the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin suddenly realises that there is nothing left for him to paint in his native France.  Desperately in need of fresh inspiration, he decides to leave Paris and undertake a long expedition to the South Seas.  On the French Polynesian island of Tahiti Gauguin discovers exactly what he is looking for - a tropical paradise where he can, for the first time in his life, live and paint in total freedom.  Here, far from the suffocating customs and restraints of his own over-civilised country, Gauguin discovers not just a new lease of life, but the perfect environment in which to liberate his art.

In Tehura, the beautiful native woman he takes as his wife, Gauguin has the ideal muse and it is no wonder that she will feature so prominently in many of his best known works.  But life turns out to be not as simple and balmy as the artist had imagined.  In his wild pursuit of artistic fulfilment he still has to earn a living, and even in a place as far from civilisation as Tahiti there are customs that must be respected.  Is Gauguin's frantic search for freedom about to be frustrated yet again...?