Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken’s Munch, which opened the International Film Festival Rotterdam, is the first feature film to dramatise the life of the eponymous Expressionist painter. But it would be wrong to consider this new screen territory. Radical docudrama pioneer Peter Watkins chose the Norwegian artist as the subject of his formally inventive 1974 mini-series Edvard Munch, which has a cult following and a deserved reputation among cinephiles as a masterpiece, despite not having screened widely. It’s no wonder, then, that it’s taken so long for another director to dare the challenge, despite the obvious dramatic potential of a painter who was as famed for his wild and troubled bohemian life as for creating, in violently swirling colour, one of the most iconic images in the history of art, The Scream. Dahlsbakken endeavours to break free from straight-up biopic terrain by enlisting four different actors to portray the artist in various phases of his adult life (a method that served Todd Haynes better in I’m Not There, his take on Bob Dylan.) Despite these flourishes, Munch remains an altogether conventional conception of the notion (increasingly outdated) that genius and torment are inextricably linked, which feels, especially given such an intense character, a tad vague and bloodless.
We shift back and forth between locations — Vestfold, Berlin, Copenhagen and Oslo — and phases of Munch’s life, clearly demarcated by different styles. First, we’re in wartime Oslo, where the elderly artist (Anne Krigsvoll) has grown reclusive. He is trying to safeguard his legacy by preventing his paintings, banned by the Nazis as degenerate, from falling into the hands of the German occupiers, with the help of financier and collector Rolf Stenersen (Anders Baasmo). But this is a film much more concerned with wild ideas and creative process than art as canvas or commodity. Echoing Munch’s own shift away from naturalism to the portrayal of emotion and the subconscious, Dahlsbakken seeks to convey his inner psychology.
Munch in all his (not so dissimilar) incarnations is melancholy and misanthropic, too alienated from bourgeois norms to feel at ease in society. The most powerful segment is his 1908 stay in a clinic in Copenhagen in 1908, shot in Expressionist black-and-white and disorienting angles, as the painter (Ola G. Furuseth) contends with a breakdown and clamouring voices in his head. Exhausted and confused, he tries to untangle in exchanges with a doctor (Jesper Christensen) how he got to this point, amid the anxiety that comes with talent, and a body battered by a near-liquid cognac diet. Weaker are more classical, sun-kissed scenes in sleepy Vestfold, in which the young Munch (Alfred Ekker Strande) has a love affair with Milly Thaulow (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), a married writer who spurns him, while making his first moves toward emotion as a painting language. The illness and death that so marked his childhood hang over later years as troubling memories.
Condemnation of Munch’s painting as “sick art” by a public not ready for it frayed his nerves. The Berlin Art Association closing down his exhibition amid scandal over his innovations fuelled a sense of persecution. The Berlin scenes show him (played by Mattis Herman Nyqvist) bouncing ideas off fellow artists and non-conformists August Strindberg, Dagny Juel, and Gustav Vigeland, though the hedonistic extremes and sexual licentiousness this set were legendary for have been disappointingly toned-down. The Black Pig bar that was their haunt has been incongruously swapped out for beers in the park and the dancefloor of a techno club, where they shout about paintbrushes over the thumping sound. This Christian Petzold-like historical slippage, in mixing elements of 1892 with the modern trappings of a heavily graffitti-ed Berlin, may prove the platitude that true creation is timeless, and must have made the practicalities of production simpler. But it pushes our suspended disbelief too far, and more problematically, effaces the very era-specific import of Munch’s Modernist innovations.
Director and producer: Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken
Screenplay: Mattis Herman Nyquist, Fredrik Hoyer, Gine Cornelia Pedersen, Eivind Saether
Cast: Alfred Ekker Strande, Mattis Herman Nyquist, Ola G. Furuseth, Anne Krigsvoll
Editing: Philip Geertsen
Cinematography: Pal Ulvik Rokseth, Oskar Dahlsbakken
Production Design: Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken
Sound Design: Johan Pram
Music: Tim Fain
Production company: The Film Company (Norway)
Sales: Viaplay
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Opening film)
In Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German and English
104 minutes
