Why is it so hard to put the lives of artists on screen convincingly? For a start, there’s the need for historical authenticity; then you have to convey something of the character of the art without being too arid or academic.

Pollock, played so effectively by Ed Harris in 2000, caught the character of the great, psychologically afflicted American with his harried, driven look and that furious, no-holds-barred technique of heaving, slopping and pouring the paint around the canvas. The trouble was that we didn’t see inside the man; there was lots of careful external observation but little real analysis.

In 2003 Leonardo,a film created by the BBC with the Open University, gave us a mixture of fictional reconstruction and scholarly explanation. That worked, in part, but those two elements stood too far apart and we were only fitfully engaged.

The glamorously shot Girl with a Pearl Earring (2004), which starred Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson, purported to tell us something of the life of the Dutch master Vermeer, but all it really succeeded in doing was to reconstruct, often magically, some powerful on-screen images of his paintings, and to show us an ever-smouldering Firth as Vermeer. We learnt little about the enigmatic character of the artist.

And what of Simon Schama’s Power of Art, which recently ran on BBC Two? Schama’s films are very watchable, because of the cerebral clout of the presenter. If it had been anyone other than Schama in charge, the way in which actors were used — they were often frantic, mute scene-setters who raced down corridors without a single word tossed in our direction — would have been highly dubious. But thanks to his powerful intellectual engagement, Schama successfully overcame the problem of marrying real scholarship with quasi-fictional dramatisation.

Now comes The Yellow House, a project fraught with difficulties. Based on a careful and scholarly book by the critic Martin Gayford, it dramatises a key nine-week period in the lives of Paul Gauguin (played by John Lynch) and Vincent Van Gogh (John Simm).

Van Gogh, who in 1888 was desperate to escape Paris for the luminescent freedom of the South of France, has rented a house in Arles, and he urges Gauguin to join him there. They will be artistic brothers. Perhaps this will even be the start of an idealistic artistic community. All goes well for a time, then things start to fall apart — they live in a tiny space, these two intense, brilliant painters who are emerging into the fullness of their creative powers, and the cohabitation ends in disaster. Jealousy, rivalry and conflicting ideals help to tear the pair apart. Van Gogh slices off part of his ear, and Gauguin flees back to Paris. Within 18 months Van Gogh has shot himself; Gauguin dies 15 years later, lonely on a Pacific island, after a long syphilitic decline. The masterpieces they created in those nine weeks are now estimated to be worth about £1 billion.

The book on which the film is based is described in Channel 4’s press release as a novel. It’s no such thing. And therein lies a major problem. This short period is actually extraordinarily well-documented, thanks in part to their letters. Van Gogh in particular was a great and voluminous scribe. You could almost say that he wrote out the story of his life in letters. He was also a very well-read man — the contemporary writing of Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, among others, haunted his imagination, and fed into his paintings. He was eloquent and relentlessly, infuriatingly impassioned.

Although the writer of the film, Simon Bent, succeeds in following the story of the breakdown of the relationship fairly faithfully, he does not capture what must have been the character of Van Gogh’s speech, or the quality and the range of his intellect. He sounds too laconic, too clipped and modern by half.

What is more, he does not look as Van Gogh would have looked. Van Gogh was dirty, graceless, smelly, awkward, fidgety. Despite some dodgy dentistry, Simm looks too clean-shaven, too attractive. He’s not tense or skinny enough.

Gauguin doesn’t quite work, either. At the start of the film we see him stalking up a long room which is dominated by a sleek pool table. It could be some upmarket bar, almost anywhere, Clapham perhaps. Yet it’s meant to have the look and the feel of a sordid brothel in Arles. Gauguin himself has too much of a gloss. The painter was inclined to dress as a Breton fisherman; in this film, he too often looks like a swashbuckling Regency dandy.

But perhaps the least convincing aspect of the film is the language and the way it is spoken. Bits of French — monsieur, mon frãre, caporal — are tossed in here and there. But otherwise it’s all English, spoken in various accents — the postmaster sounds defiantly Scottish. How does the one language relate to the other? It doesn’t. The issue is unresolved.

It’s a great idea for a film. It’s a wonderful book. The film is an overburnished, unconvincing mess from start to finish.

The Yellow House, Thur, C4, 9pm

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