You and Me and Gauguin
This year the annual Monterrey International Film Festival (FIC) chose France as their “guest country” and the movie I most wanted to see was Voyage to Tahiti.
We followed Paul Gauguin, as he had followed Pierre Loti, to a functionally fictionalized and eroticized Tahiti where pre-pubescent girls present as fully formed exotic women, outsiders are mostly welcomed into the fold and the entirety of an island exists for your inspiration. Imperialist in its imaginings, Gauguin’s singular endeavor consumes people and place only to reproduce them in oil paint and block print. Which is not to say that his art is unforgivably colonialist but the movie about his art kinda is. It was lovely enough but fraught with some familiar problems.
This biopic distills Gauguin’s syphilitic promiscuity down to one mostly monogamous made-for-the-movies love story. The writers flipped the script and portray him as the misunderstood husband of unsupportive wives, the unappreciated hero who died, as all the Great Starving Artists do, in penniless obscurity. He abandoned his Danish wife and their five children in Paris but that is redressed as her lack of faith in his talent and his spoiled children’s desire to not live in frozen filth. That his Tahitian child bride leaves him for a boy her own age is a betrayal designed to pain us too. It is lamented instead as a May-December romance that failed to…
