Paul Gauguin in Paradise found (2003)
Review by John A. Walker (2010), the author of Art & Artists on screen.
Kiefer Sutherland is a major American movie and television star even though he was born in London in 1966 and raised in Canada. Since he is the son of Donald Sutherland, he has benefited from having a famous father (unlike Emil Gauguin who once claimed that having a famous father was “a curse”). Remarkably, both Donald and Kiefer have played the role of Paul Gauguin in films. Donald appeared in The wolf at the door and Kiefer starred in the Australian-French-German-UK co-production Paradise found in 2003.
For the role, Kiefer Sutherland grew a beard, wore his hair long and prepared by reading biographies of Paul Gauguin, viewing his father’s film and talking to some contemporary painters about Gauguin’s significance and legacy. Also starring as Gauguin’s Danish wife Mette was the German-born actress Natassja Kinski. Mette and Paul were married in 1873 and had five children. (Paul had several other children by his mistresses in Paris and Polynesia.) Two other famous nineteenth-century artists were featured: Camille Pissarro, played by Alun Armstrong, and Vincent van Gogh, played by Peter Varga.
During 2001, Paradise found (the title is a play on Milton’s famous poem Paradise lost but the film should really have been entitled Paradise invented) was shot near Port Douglas, North East Queensland, a tropical setting that stood in for Polynesia and in Prague, a city that substituted for Paris. It was premiered in 2003, the year that marked the centenary of Gauguin’s death. This film did not have a cinema release— it appeared on various television channels and on DVD. The screenplay was by John Goldsmith (b. 1947), an experienced British novelist and writer for film and television, and the producer/director was the Australian Mario Andreacchio (b. 1955). The plot of this partial biopic concerns episodes in Paul Gauguin’s married life in Paris, Rouen and Copenhagen during the 1870s and 1880s— when he was torn between the need to provide for his wife and children, and a desire to paint— and in the South Seas during the early 1890s after he has failed to make a living in Denmark as a sales representative.
Early scenes in Paris portray Paul Gauguin as a loving husband and father, a successful stockbroker, art collector and amateur painter who enjoys a high standard of living. He meets Camille Pissarro, buys one of his landscapes and is flattered when Pissarro says that Gauguin has natural talent as a painter. Gauguin gives up his job in order to become a painter and the family soon slides into poverty. The film endorses Mette’s opinion that Paul acted selfishly and irresponsibly. It does not explain that one reason he switched from commerce to art was the stock market crash of 1882. His decision to take up a career as a painter, therefore, was a rational one that in the long term proved to be sensible because, eventually, his wife and children did benefit from the sales of his collection and his own art. We see Gauguin in Paris again in 1893 when he returns from Polynesia to mount an exhibition of his exotic canvases. At the opening, the public responds with derisive laughter and even his friend Pissarro finds the paintings’ non-naturalistic colours and strange symbolism incomprehensible. Gauguin briefly explains the meaning of one canvas but his speech is too glib to be persuasive. Since the exhibition is not the financial success that Gauguin had hoped, he has to return to Polynesia in order to maintain the myth of the artist-as-savage at odds with the decadent culture of Europe.
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