Published 2016 on Down Under Flix
Director: Mario Andreacchio
Director: Mario Andreacchio
Stars: Kiefer Sutherland, Natassja Kinski, Alun Armstrong, Chris
Haywood, Nicholas Hope
A
broad ocker comedy. A gritty police procedural charting murky moral waters. A
Shakespeare adaptation. A road movie about Indigenous youth. An art-house drama
about intimacy issues. Given the variety of films covered on Down Under
Flix thus far, it’s fairly clear that “Australian cinema” is a fluid, rubbery,
malleable term that can encompass a range of different genres, styles and
tones.
Paradise
Found, a
film about a French artist in Tahiti starring the guy from The Lost Boys and 24, is another Australian film,
and a somewhat unlikely one. But this Paul Gauguin biopic has an Australian
director, Mario Andreacchio; it features veteran Australian actors in
supporting roles; it was filmed in Queensland as well as the Czech Republic;
and it was funded by Australian as well as French, German and British
financiers. And while we tend to associate such cinematic appropriations of
other cultures and historical figures with Hollywood – by way of example,
Anthony Quinn scored an Oscar for playing Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 Vincent
van Gogh biopic Lust
for Life – it’s also a typical instance of cinematic
globalization in action.
The
plot of Paradise Found alternates
between two periods and places: 1870s Europe and 1890s Tahiti. In the former, a
chance meeting with the artist Camille Pissaro (Alun Armstrong) ignites a
creative spark in husband, father and stockbroker Paul Gauguin (Kiefer
Sutherland) that leads to the dissolution of his marriage and career in pursuit
of art. In the latter, an older, dissolute Gauguin arrives in Tahiti and
struggles with artist’s block before finding inspiration in the dying culture
and natural beauty of the island, and in the process challenges the local
missionary and authorities.
Director
Mario Andreacchio is an interesting cat. His feature debut, Fair Game, was an outback-set,
rough and tumble Ozploitation thriller about a woman being victimized by three
kangaroo hunters and exacting bloody revenge on her tormentors (click here for an old piece I wrote on Fair Game and other Ozploitation thrillers).
He later specialized in family-themed, usually animal-centric
entertainments, like Napoleon (about
a golden retriever), The
Real Macaw (about a parrot), Elephant Tales (no explanation needed) and
most recently The Dragon
Pearl (about a dragon). Amidst all this, he made a film about
Gauguin. Andreacchio’s a talented and – given his choice of genres and subject matter
–internationally-minded director, and on a craft level Paradise Found is
topnotch. The photography and art direction throughout are clean and colourful,
much like Gauguin’s work, rejecting the default muted aesthetic of many period
productions. In addition, the dual timelines structure keeps the film interesting
and zipping along, rather than the typical chronological A to Z biopic
structure.
However,
the film’s chief issue is that despite its structural ingenuity, it otherwise
conforms closely to the very well-worn tropes and clichés of biopics
about artists, writers, musicians, athletes, and so on. It’s
understandable why these tropes and clichés exist: they help the medicine go
down, providing recognizable shorthand to help filmmakers encapsulate and
wrestle life stories onto film. Andreacchio’s task isn’t enviable: on top of
depicting one of the great nineteenth century artists, he must also paint in
broad strokes the Parisian art scene of the late 1800s, the intoxicating
natural beauty of Tahiti, and the devastating effects of colonialism on the
island. Consequently, one shouldn’t be surprised that Paradise Found is cut from
the same cloth as other films about tortured, misunderstood geniuses who create
great works and act like total jerks.
But
unlike, say, Mike Leigh’s Mr.
Turner or Ed Harris’s Pollock, Paradise Found never
really transcends those tropes, and the result is a somewhat formulaic, Hero’s
Journey-shaped biopic with familiar plot beats. For example, at one point
Gauguin proclaims to his long-suffering wife Mette (Natassja Kinski) “I am
going to do something different, something that nobody has ever seen before! I
am here to start a revolution!” It’s an instance of the tropes doing all the
work: Gauguin says he’s a great artist, we as viewers know he’s a great artist,
we’ve seen similar moments in similar films, and there’s a base appeal to
seeing someone stick it to the system, hence the scene coasts on that mutual
understanding without offering fresh insights. Still, it gets the job done.
With Paradise Found, Kiefer
Sutherland became the second member of the Sutherland family to essay the role
of Paul Gauguin: his father played the painter in 1986’s Oviri. The film was made during
Sutherland’s tenure on 24,
the TV series that provided a nice autumn for the star’s waning career, and
it’s curious to see how the actor, so formidable and swaggering and outsized on
the small screen, feels just a bit too small for Gauguin on the big screen. He
delivers a good performance and tears into the part with relish, roaring and
snarling and brooding up a storm and laughing like a pirate (really, we should’ve seen that coming), but he never quite
transcends the “rebel artist” archetype he’s working with. Similarly, Natassja
Kinski does good work but never transcends her generic “downtrodden wife”role.
The
supporting cast, free of character arcs, have more fun. Chris Haywood (star
of last week's Human Touch) is suitably grizzled and dissolute as
Gauguin’s Tahitian confidante, while fellow local actor Nicholas Hope is
simultaneously bristly and sympathetic as a priest misguided in his conviction
to destroy the Tahitian culture. Also a nice presence is Alun Armstrong, an
instantly recognizable “that guy” character actor with credits ranging
from Braveheart and Patriot Games to Married… with Children, in the
role of Pissaro.
Paradise Found is an entertaining
primer for Gauguin newbies and a good example of Australian cinematic globalization,
but it feels very, very familiar.
Ben Kooyman