Cinema: in the shoes of Edvard Munch, painter of The Scream

Munch, his life rather than his work. Or rather the original mystery of his unique work which never ceases to surprise with its audacity, its X-ray lucidity and its Nordic spring freshness. She transformed her life (1863-1944), at its cruelest, from the dramas of her childhood to the violent failures of her loves, in a separate palette, at first dark like a symbolist tale, then lively and airy like a Gauguin between Brittany and the islands.

A tumultuous river of masterpieces which today brings glory to Norway, the Nasjonalmuseet and the Munchmuseet of Oslo in their brand new monuments. And the joy of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris which triumphed with its retrospective last winter. Rather than a documentary, the young Norwegian filmmaker Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken wanted to make “the first fiction adaptation on the big screen of the life of Edvard Munch”. The father of expressionism is played by four actors at four key moments in his life. In the shoes of Edvard Munch, so to speak.

The result is a mix of genres, in every sense of the word. There is Strindberg's theater in the country banquet which confronts the young Edvard Munch, milk complexion and red curls, with his first betrayal in love with Milly Thaulow, an emancipated woman who seduces and disdains him The camera follows the actor Alfred Ekker Strande walking along the Åsgårdstrand orchard on the edge of the fjord. We feel with it, in a subtle and acute way, the brevity of the beautiful days in these northern latitudes. She embodies the brevity of happiness and the illusion of the future. “I believed that it was the beginnings of happiness, it was happiness,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Only nature remains, a source of joy in the worst hours. There is dramatic behind closed doors, almost theater, in Munch's stay in 1908 with Dr. Jacobson in Copenhagen, where the artist discusses, analyzes and searches for himself like a modern man in search of himself. Fleeing the effects, Ola G. Furuseth lends her hollow cheeks and her inquisitive gaze to Munch, then on the edge of the precipice. It is poignant.

Also read: Edvard Munch, a painter in search of a soul

There is some offbeat extrapolation with the 30-year-old Munch, a revolutionary and hypersensitive artist who must face rejection in Berlin at the turn of the century. Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken transposes it into Berlin in the 1980s. At first disturbing, this anachronistic chapter sheds light on the artist's throes with a contemporary note which takes on its meaning through the text, a sort of timeless reflection on the human condition with a Mattis Herman Nyquist with an almost shaved head and a recessed body. There is finally some Goya-style grotesquery with the 80-year-old Munch, played by the queen of the Norwegian stage Anne Krigsvoll, stooped like a devil. We don't immediately see what's wrong with this funny face, but the solitude of the reclusive old man is palpable, like the scathing vivacity of his mind. These four Munchs form a kaleidoscope of contradictory emotions, filmed with all the vigor of this admirer of Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Haneke.

The Note of Figaro: 3/4