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*** “Paul Gauguin: The Savage Dream.”

Home Vision. $39.95.

Treating a sensationally unhappy life with uncommon equanimity, this film presents the human dimension of Gauguin’s struggle between his desire to feed his family and his need to run with his inspiration. He escaped to Tahiti and won posthumous adulation but at an enormous cost to his health and emotional well-being. A misfit who discovered a colonized paradise and never learned to speak the native language or live off the land, he re-created the islanders to fit his imagination. As images of a sleeping child give way to death-shrouded horsemen in his paintings, the exotic vision that was born to Gauguin during a childhood sojourn in Peru becomes an unbearable burden. Shot on location in Tahiti and the Marquesas, this film (also being shown on the Bravo cable channel this month) provides sound biographical context for the retrospective exhibition that opened at the National Gallery and will be at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sept. 17 to Dec. 11.