The first things we hear in Giuseppe Capotondi's unsettling art-world thriller are the heavy strains of a Handel aria filling a hallway, rising up, rich and majestic — until the record skips, the operatic vibrato glitches, and the vinyl crushes into silence.
This opening sequence acts as a painful metaphor for the career of art critic James Figueras (Claes Bang) — he's plunged from "boy wonder" of the establishment to cash-strapped fringe dweller, making loose change off lecturing tourists in European hotspots.
Less intentionally, the metaphor mirrors the film — which after a promising set-up, slinks off into shallower waters, following an unsatisfying neo-noir rubric.
It's at one of his lectures that James is accosted by the coolly American Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), her potential ulterior motives concealed behind a thin porcelain smile and a sharp tongue. Despite what she says, one may quite reasonably presume she's not just there for the "free potato chips".
One sex scene later, they shoot off to spend the weekend at the estate of eccentric, prescient art collector Joseph Cassidy, played by Mick Jagger in his first real acting role in two decades. Rock-star vibes are set aside for shady art-world deviance, and one can almost detect the invisible strings of puppetry sewn around his fingertips as he grandly gesticulates through a series of beguiling repartees with his two guests.
The new couple luxuriate in Cassidy's majestic neoclassical villa (walls rich with colourful contemporary abstractions the likes of Rothko) captured adoringly by David Ungaro's smooth, reserved cinematography. Lingering shots on wafting curtains and a lake-side view build a bright, high-brow atmosphere in which secrets glimmer with stylish allure.
It's inside this mansion that Cassidy makes James a proposition: the chance of a lifetime, to be the first critic to interview renowned hermetic artist Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland) in over 50 years, and thus rescue James's career from its squalid depths. In return, Cassidy wants James to procure him one of Debney's paintings — the transaction's legality, or lack thereof, neatly unspecified.
James, propelled by burning ambition and a smidge of blackmail, accepts. With Berenice in tow, he converses with Debney for an exclusive new profile, all the while scheming about how to steal one of his paintings.
As James Figueras, Claes Bang reprises the suave, high-brow swagger of his previous art-douche role in Palme d'Or winner The Square. He sports immaculate hair and a half-smoked cigarette betwixt his fingers lest you forget his sophistication, and a pill-popping habit lest you forget his anti-hero complexity.
Based on Charles Willeford's crime novel of the same name, Capotondi's version of The Burnt Orange Heresy borrows some of book-James's hyper-intellectual egotism, but astutely skips out on Willeford's blatantly chauvinistic depiction of Berenice as a dumb (but beautiful!) sounding board to James's long-winded diatribes.
Instead, Debicki (Widows, The Night Manager) carves a flawed, enigmatic figure whose wilful attachment to James gives off raw shades of vulnerability and uncertainty — though these hints at an inner knotted complexity are ultimately sidelined.
Art in film often adopts an intangible, metaphorical character — imagined as an illusory mode of social activism in The Square, or an immortalisation of memory in last year's Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
But art's presence in The Burnt Orange Heresy hems closer to Velvet Buzzsaw's interpretation of art as a quite literal menace — in this case, an object of greed, ambition and redemption, which pushes the most driven to unimagined edges.
To James though, it's also a blank canvas to be coloured and enriched by contextualisation, conversation, and even some creative (read: criminal) meddling. The lecture that opens the film, in which James haughtily demonstrates the tremendous power of criticism to mould the meaning of art, might be a cheeky pander to reviewers everywhere to boost the film's Rotten Tomatoes score.
But on the flip side, it exposes the fickleness of artistic value to its surrounding discourse — a poignant subject as the narrative navigates the effects of revisionism, forgery and critique.
Combined with a man and a woman whose relationship fast takes on a marital flavour, The Burnt Orange Heresy feels at times to be a paperback thriller version of Abbas Kiarostami's art-house film Certified Copy, a celluloid riddle which explores deftly the thin and potentially meaningless line between things real and counterfeit.
Here, unfortunately, these themes are merely skimmed; instead, unwarranted weight is given to a heavy-handed and not particularly interesting motif of a fly as a symbol for sin.
Plot takes the driver's seat as the winding thriller spins off into a predictable series of darker and darker offences.
The film also gives off a whiff of self-indulgent snobbery, with its grand architecture, beautiful people, and a script chock full of small adages and self-satisfied wit.
Willeford's source novel offers a tongue-in-cheek satire of the self-important, insular nature of the art industry, which often seems to elliptically draw meaning out of very little (a crack on the wall forming the basis of a whole art movement, for example). But this sharp critique is lost in Capotondi's adaptation; in a better film, the perplexing symbiosis between art and criticism would be parsed out and dissected, instead of being suffocated in a hasty last act.
And under Capotondi's cool direction, the characters do not develop further from their initial handsome personas, their various sins and tragedies fleshed out only by brief expositions. On the screen, they are slippery, sly creatures, sharing between them barely a grain of empathy.
As a result, the stakes, even as they expand to that of life and death, ring hollow.
The Burnt Orange Heresy is in cinemas from July 23.
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2020-07-22 18:56:00Z
CAIiEAlEoycGt_u6hzf0Vye5JSUqFggEKg4IACoGCAow3vI9MPeaCDDc2g4
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