When Pialat began his impressionistic portrait of Van Gogh, he didn't resign himself to just another reworking of the unknowable artist. Minnelli's glitzy biopic Lust for Life, Altman's psychological drama Vincent & Theo, and Paul Cox's quirky documentary Vincent had their own particular fascination for the tortured life of the great Dutch artist. But Pialat had an oddly fresh, even revisionist notion about his subject. If Van Gogh could finish a hundred paintings in the final sixty-seven days of his life, could he have been in the throes of a paralyzing depression? Because he too was a painter, Pialat resists this hackneyed idea, giving us instead a gentler Van Gogh, troubled and sometimes dejected, but not a paint-guzzling bedlamite staring into the abyss. Lingering set-pieces, often swathed in details reminiscent of Renoir, Cézanne, and Seurat, convey a less frantic time during which Van Gogh, played with dour perfection by Jacques Dutronc, could muster an affair with Marguerite Gachet (Alexandra London), carouse boisterously with the prostitutes of Paris, and quietly long for the wife (Corinne Bourdon) of his brother Theo. In Pialat's view, Van Gogh has had a glimpse of happiness. Perhaps it was beauty killed the beast?-Steve Seid