Loving Vincent (Original Soundtrack Album)

Album review

Loving Vincent owes it’s visual shocks and a technical achievements to Dorota Kobiela, a Polish painter and video maker who was first gained recognition in 2011 for the animated short film Little Postman that was crafted with stereoscopic paint. For this enormous project, she was joined by the British director Hugh Welchman, along with 125 artists who were called in to create 60,000 oil paintings! Loving Vincent tells the story of the painter’s last few days from the point of view of Armand Roulin, the postman’s son and friend of Van Gogh, who searches for the truth about the death of this genius. Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Annecy animation festival, the film displays a certain visual prowess, though one mustn’t overlook the soundtrack signed by Clint Mansell, the same man who brought us Requiem For A Dream and Black Swan. He was also the singer and guitarist from the group Pop Will Eat Itself until they broke up in 1996. The music is immediately striking with its delicate textures, due to the impeccable execution of the Chamber Orchestra of London. But this softness is often mixed with a certain darkness, illustrating the complex personality of Van Gogh: the British composer wanted to confront two aesthetics, just like the painter who was torn between his creative talent and his mental instability. For Mansell, genius is both a gift and a curse. The ambiguous nature of the music also reflects the design of the film, which is composed of a number of flashbacks in black and white, contrasting with the intensity of the colours seen in the rest of the film (colours typical of Van Gogh, which Kobiela tried to match as closely as possible). A piece such as Wheatfield With Crows represents this ambivalent aesthetic, with a mezzo piano on one side and saturated sounds on the other. As always with Mansell, one finds his total mastery of minimalist and repetitive music, in which he has constantly displayed his expertise following his masterpiece for Requiem For A Dream in 2000, directed by his partner Darren Aronofsky, for whom he has also composed music for other feature films including Pi, Black Swan, The Wrestler and Noé. © NM/Qobuz