Chris Knipp
01-02-2014, 08:16 PM
Giuseppe Tornatore: The Best Offer (2013)
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/640x480q90/540/6Yu1yS.jpg
Art scammer in love, wearing gloves and nice suits
The Best Offer, a glamorous confection set in Europe and in English, is the latest from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, starring an impeccable Geoffrey Rush as a high level auctioneer and art expert who falls for a reclusive young heiress apparently afflicted with agoraphobia. Tornatore has had a seies of near-successes but is still fondly remembered for his big American arthouse hit, the nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988). It was just revived for its "silver anniversary." Cinema Paradiso is a candy-colored love letter to movies and moviegoing featuring an old projectiojist (Philippe Noiret), a little boy, and an equally sweet score by Ennio Morricone. Tornatore's collaboration with Morricone was to continue, each time with a score hyper-excited in a different way.
Rather creditable, and somewhat in the order of an intelligent thriller, was Tornatore's A Pure Formality (1994) a police investigation drama in French featuring Gérard Depardieu as a famous author arrested as a suspect and Roman Polanski (whose Death and the Maiden the action recalled) as the naive police inspector whose job is to investigate him. Unfortunately the film is spoiled by a far-fetched surprise finale. The Best Offer has a surprise ending too, and then fizzles away into a weak coda.
In 2000 we got Malena, providing a different sort of nostalgia from Cinema Paradiso's, of a sub-Fellini kind, about a tempting seaside babe (Monica Bellucci) and teen erections. Malena appealed to the American arthouse crowd again, but this time betrayed the trust it won with a bad finale, this time a blatantly exploitative one.
Skip forward another six years and things went badly wrong for Tornatore with <a href="http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=838&view=previous">The Unknown Woman</a> (2006), a violent, overcomplicated mess about an inexplicably wicked foreign domestic worker in Italy. This incomprehensible disaster understandably never got US distribution.
Seven years further on, The Best Offer has limited US release but is destined for a quiet death. By the way Tornatore directed an earlier film in English, 1998's The Legend of 1900, which the noted Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco (of Silk) had a hand in. It was poorly received. Why do we keep coming back to Tornatore? Well, Cinema Paradiso is one of the most fondly remembered foreign films of the arthouse mainstream, and Malena had its moments of titillation, and much of A Pure Formality, if anyone remembers it, seemed intelligent. The Best Offer has the air of the most high-toned hokiness. It's an elaborate deception in the manner of John Fowles.
Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) is a very posh, lonely esthete who always wears gloves and has lit up floor-to-ceiling racks of them to choose from, to go with his impeccable suits: he's a sexless Gatsby of art scammers. He drinks only champagne, and lives in a huge, glamorous suite of apartments with a secret chamber whose high walls are covered with paintings floor to ceiling like some 19th-century gallery. They are valuable works he has bought up crookedly for a song by mis-labeling them as copies or works by artists of lesser value and having his collaborator Billy Whistler (Donald Sutherland) buy them for him at auctions he conducts. They are all portraits of women through the ages and Virgil sits and admires them, making up perhaps for the fact that he has never had a girlfriend.
Until Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), the agoraphobic young lady with a collection to sell out of the crumbling villa she has inherited. She, like Virgil's illicit female portraits, is hidden away out of sight. Virgil falls in love with her by shouting at her through walls. He also gets Robert (Jim Sturgess), an ingenious craftsman-mechanic good with the ladies, to assemble pieces of an automaton he finds at the villa and advise him on how to win over Claire. As Clarie opens up to Virgil and her collection is catalogued and an auction approaches, a revelation also is coming that we have already guessed at a good while before it arrives. Its obviousness doesn't keep it from being dramatic in the staging, though -- this movie is rich in striking images and scenes -- so it's disappointing how subsequent scenes undermine and weaken the shock revelation, so it seems not to matter so much.
Tornatore's work has rarely seemed so campy and baroque. And by the way, where does all this happen? Well, in Trieste, Bolzano, Fidenza, Rome, Milan, Merano, Vienna, and Prague, of course -- without any explanation of how and why we're slipping from one location to another. When Virgil goes over to London for his final big auction one wonders where he is going there from. (One of those places, dummy!) The Guardian critic's "First Look" review calls this "the international hotel style," and I guess that explains it. The multiplicity of locales is part of an over-complexity weighing down a film that would have worked better with more of a light comic touch. It takes itself too seriously.
The Best Offer plays artfully with themes of identity, authenticity, and truth, and its interiors and art and clothes are a feast for the eyes. But its action, like Rush's elegant style, is stiff and formal. More than an intellectual game à la Marienbad, this is an art scam thriller and a romance, and it needs Hitchcockian momentum and suspense. Instead, it drags, and as it drags one begins to figure out too much and care too little. Geoffrey Rush's impeccability, perhaps not for the first time in a movie, begins to seem wasted. This time the inevitable Morricone soundtrack makes heavy use of voices, with an effect of hysteria that is also distancing.
The Best Offer/La migliore offerta, 130 mins., debuted at the Berlinale after a January 2013 Italian theatrical release. It opened (limited) in the US 1 Jan. 2014. Screened for this review at the IFC Center, NYC.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/640x480q90/540/6Yu1yS.jpg
Art scammer in love, wearing gloves and nice suits
The Best Offer, a glamorous confection set in Europe and in English, is the latest from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, starring an impeccable Geoffrey Rush as a high level auctioneer and art expert who falls for a reclusive young heiress apparently afflicted with agoraphobia. Tornatore has had a seies of near-successes but is still fondly remembered for his big American arthouse hit, the nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988). It was just revived for its "silver anniversary." Cinema Paradiso is a candy-colored love letter to movies and moviegoing featuring an old projectiojist (Philippe Noiret), a little boy, and an equally sweet score by Ennio Morricone. Tornatore's collaboration with Morricone was to continue, each time with a score hyper-excited in a different way.
Rather creditable, and somewhat in the order of an intelligent thriller, was Tornatore's A Pure Formality (1994) a police investigation drama in French featuring Gérard Depardieu as a famous author arrested as a suspect and Roman Polanski (whose Death and the Maiden the action recalled) as the naive police inspector whose job is to investigate him. Unfortunately the film is spoiled by a far-fetched surprise finale. The Best Offer has a surprise ending too, and then fizzles away into a weak coda.
In 2000 we got Malena, providing a different sort of nostalgia from Cinema Paradiso's, of a sub-Fellini kind, about a tempting seaside babe (Monica Bellucci) and teen erections. Malena appealed to the American arthouse crowd again, but this time betrayed the trust it won with a bad finale, this time a blatantly exploitative one.
Skip forward another six years and things went badly wrong for Tornatore with <a href="http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=838&view=previous">The Unknown Woman</a> (2006), a violent, overcomplicated mess about an inexplicably wicked foreign domestic worker in Italy. This incomprehensible disaster understandably never got US distribution.
Seven years further on, The Best Offer has limited US release but is destined for a quiet death. By the way Tornatore directed an earlier film in English, 1998's The Legend of 1900, which the noted Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco (of Silk) had a hand in. It was poorly received. Why do we keep coming back to Tornatore? Well, Cinema Paradiso is one of the most fondly remembered foreign films of the arthouse mainstream, and Malena had its moments of titillation, and much of A Pure Formality, if anyone remembers it, seemed intelligent. The Best Offer has the air of the most high-toned hokiness. It's an elaborate deception in the manner of John Fowles.
Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) is a very posh, lonely esthete who always wears gloves and has lit up floor-to-ceiling racks of them to choose from, to go with his impeccable suits: he's a sexless Gatsby of art scammers. He drinks only champagne, and lives in a huge, glamorous suite of apartments with a secret chamber whose high walls are covered with paintings floor to ceiling like some 19th-century gallery. They are valuable works he has bought up crookedly for a song by mis-labeling them as copies or works by artists of lesser value and having his collaborator Billy Whistler (Donald Sutherland) buy them for him at auctions he conducts. They are all portraits of women through the ages and Virgil sits and admires them, making up perhaps for the fact that he has never had a girlfriend.
Until Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), the agoraphobic young lady with a collection to sell out of the crumbling villa she has inherited. She, like Virgil's illicit female portraits, is hidden away out of sight. Virgil falls in love with her by shouting at her through walls. He also gets Robert (Jim Sturgess), an ingenious craftsman-mechanic good with the ladies, to assemble pieces of an automaton he finds at the villa and advise him on how to win over Claire. As Clarie opens up to Virgil and her collection is catalogued and an auction approaches, a revelation also is coming that we have already guessed at a good while before it arrives. Its obviousness doesn't keep it from being dramatic in the staging, though -- this movie is rich in striking images and scenes -- so it's disappointing how subsequent scenes undermine and weaken the shock revelation, so it seems not to matter so much.
Tornatore's work has rarely seemed so campy and baroque. And by the way, where does all this happen? Well, in Trieste, Bolzano, Fidenza, Rome, Milan, Merano, Vienna, and Prague, of course -- without any explanation of how and why we're slipping from one location to another. When Virgil goes over to London for his final big auction one wonders where he is going there from. (One of those places, dummy!) The Guardian critic's "First Look" review calls this "the international hotel style," and I guess that explains it. The multiplicity of locales is part of an over-complexity weighing down a film that would have worked better with more of a light comic touch. It takes itself too seriously.
The Best Offer plays artfully with themes of identity, authenticity, and truth, and its interiors and art and clothes are a feast for the eyes. But its action, like Rush's elegant style, is stiff and formal. More than an intellectual game à la Marienbad, this is an art scam thriller and a romance, and it needs Hitchcockian momentum and suspense. Instead, it drags, and as it drags one begins to figure out too much and care too little. Geoffrey Rush's impeccability, perhaps not for the first time in a movie, begins to seem wasted. This time the inevitable Morricone soundtrack makes heavy use of voices, with an effect of hysteria that is also distancing.
The Best Offer/La migliore offerta, 130 mins., debuted at the Berlinale after a January 2013 Italian theatrical release. It opened (limited) in the US 1 Jan. 2014. Screened for this review at the IFC Center, NYC.