We Watched At Eternity’s Gate, a biopic about Vincent Van Gogh, with Willem Dafoe playing Van Gogh, Mads Micklesson as the priest, and a few other notable names.
Neither of us enjoyed it quite as much as Loving Vincent, but I think (for me) it was because the film relied heavily on an effect where the bottom half of the screen was blurred, as you saw through Vincent’s eyes. The rest was very, ‘shaky cam’, as in Blair Witch, and the result of these two things together made it physically difficult to focus and watch. There was no indication of why they made these choices. Did the blurring of vision represent the clouding of his mind, a visual defect, his way of seeing things ‘differently’? It certainly seems to best represent a defect of eyesight, and though I’ve seen it said that Van Gogh maybe over-represented yellow, I’ve never seen anything to suggest that he was pretty blind (but only in the bottom half of his vision).
Maybe I’m just too stupid to have understood, but I t was confusing and could have perhaps been either made a bit more obvious what they were trying to achieve, or the effect done away with, because it really detracted from the beautiful but tragic story.
Solid performances, especially from Dafoe who often went many screen minutes without any dialogue.