Munch

Director: Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken (Norway). Year of Release: 2023

Oslo, 1943. The German police are visiting a large house. Seeing the paintings lying around, they ask the owner if he’s any good. “Not really”, says Edvard Munch. You may know him from The Scream. He responds to them in fluent German, explaining that he used to live in Berlin. They tell him that their boss is interested in Munch’s work (Munch’s work had been labelled by the Nazis as Degenerate Art). When they leave, it becomes pretty clear, that Munch is not a great fan of Hitler.

It’s not long before we’ve left Occupied Oslo and gone to Copenhagen in 1908. Munch is being admitted to a mental institution, partly because of his alcoholism. The colour changes to monochrome, and the aspect ratio to 4:3. Black and white film on a screen the same shape as an old television set used to be quite adventurous. Now it’s a device employed in almost every second film.

We move to Vesthold, Eastern Norway. It’s 1884 and Munch has travelled with his family to paint the countryside. But he can’t wait to get back to the Big City. He falls in love, but that love is not requited, partly because Tulla, the woman he falls in love with is married. The Vesthold scenes are the ones most typical of a period drama. Munch takes his easel, goes towards the coast and just starts painting.

Then we’re in Berlin and it’s 1892, only it isn’t because when he crosses the Oberbaumbrücke, Munch’s mobile beeps inside his leather jacket. Later, Munch goes to techno clubs with playwright August Strindberg, who is played by a woman. Munch has an exhibition which is initially successful, then promptly closes. Visitors wear modern dress, and Munch has a hipster moustache. You get the feeling that director Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken is trying very hard to make a statement.

The obvious comparison is with I’m Not There – Todd Haynes’s biopic of Bob Dylan, which starred 7 actors, including Cate Blanchett, showing “different aspects of Dylan”. Now, I didn’t get as wild about I’m Not There as some people – I thought it was ok, but am not sure it was worth all the effort. Nonetheless, I would argue that it had one significant difference to Munch. Just bear with me a little, while I make a couple of unsustained generalisation.

People of my generation at least have a rough idea of Bob Dylan’s biography – or at least of the myth that he built up about himself – especially 1960-75 Dylan, who, if I remember rightly, was the main focus of Haynes’s film. This means that when I’m Not There goes off on certain flights of fancy, at least we have a certain degree of being grounded. It doesn’t matter that the biography we see on screen contains a lot of abstract metaphor, because we are aware of Dylan’s real history.

Now, while most people will have heard of Edvard Munch, I think it’s a safe bet to presume that a majority doesn’t know many more of his works than The Scream. So, when the film opened in Nazi-Occupied Norway, I did feel a sense of anticipation. Here’s this artist who we vaguely know as the painter of one particular work – maybe a couple more – and suddenly we learn something that historically locates him. Something which is interesting is his biography

Except that even in this scene, Munch is played by a woman in prosthetics. It is all illusion, the director playing around with us. And even this is fine – I’m all for a bit of creativity in art – but I don’t see any benefit in saying that you’re showing a biography – even of an expressionist painter with the creativity of Edvard Munch – and then to blandly state that the facts of his life just don’t interest you. You’d be better just making a fiction from the start.

I understand the Argument for the Defence. Much of Munch’s Art challenges the conventions of simple realism. So why should it adhere to the conventions of boring painting-by-numbers biopics? The problem is that this “playful creativity” ends us, as the critics may say “up its own arse”. You get the feeling that you can’t really understand what is happening, unless you have a copy of a press release telling you what is supposed to happen. That’s not Art.

It also exhibits signs of being produced by someone who is both self-regarding and unusually needy. We are taken away from any thoughts of Munch himself, and are expected to marvel in the glory of a film maker who is Boldly Challenging Artistic Conventions. Except that for all its fluidity in casting, Munch is a very conventional film about a Great Artist struggling to survive in a society which was unable to contemplate his earth-shattering talent.

For all its pretensions towards experimentalism, Munch ultimately tells a typically conservative story of “Artist as tortured genius”. Although Munch lives in several different countries, he rarely interacts with their inhabitants, outside a few members of his exalted circle of artists. When he is hospitalised in Copenhagen, a doctor says: “geniuses suffer from a mental imbalance.” In other words, art has nothing to do with outside society, it’s just a product of the artist’s manic brain.

For most of the time, my reaction to the film was: “What is the point of that?” The film seems to be trying awfully hard, but the result is more of a film shouting “Look at me” than one which tells us anything profound. At one point, Munch explains that he prefers art that operates at a particular frequency. This is a cry for help from a writer who realises that if he doesn’t shroud his story in psychological mumbo-jumbo, his audience will realise that the Emperor has no clothes.

I presume the writer is a “he”. With this sort of pretentious vaingloriousness, it usually is.