The Best Offer (2013)
Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore
Virgil Oldman is a world renowned antiques expert and auctioneer. An eccentric genius, he leads a solitary life, going to extreme lengths to keep his distance from the messiness of human relationships. When appointed by the beautiful but emotionally damaged Claire to oversee the valuation and sale of her family’s priceless art collection, Virgil allows himself to form an attachment to her – and soon he is engulfed by a passion which will rock his bland existence to the core.
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Virgil becomes obsessed with the unseen Claire, in a manner reminiscent of the hard-bitten Dana Andrews falling in love with the painting of Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger's " Laura ".
It's a poor man's Vertigo in the end, attempting to capture an enigmatic aura that surrounds an out-of-reach female beauty, but lacking in the compelling qualities that Hitchcock was able to evoke through poetic rhythms, emotional yearning, and hypnotic atmosphere.
Tornatore's first English-language feature The Best Offer could be titled Agoraphobia - as Hitch titled Vertigo (1958).
Claire’s mysterious condition, and the particulars of Virgil’s growing bond with her, carry shades of Vertigo-style obsession and even a bit of Spike Jonze’s Her in the length of time she spends as a disembodied voice.
Directed and written by Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”), the film creates an appealingly uncompromising protagonist and a lush sense of suspense straight out of a 1940s film like “Suspicion” or “Rebecca.”
Directed and written by Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”), the film creates an appealingly uncompromising protagonist and a lush sense of suspense straight out of a 1940s film like “Suspicion” or “Rebecca.”
An English-lingo art world thriller with shades of "Hugo" should be a creatively winning combination for Giuseppe Tornatore's sumptuous "The Best Offer," yet beneath the varnish lies a work crying out for proper subtext.
Could it be the mechanical man we all fondly remember from Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”?
Oldman also picks up pieces of an automaton – apparently left over from "Hugo" – and takes them to a young mechanic (Jim Sturgess) who assembles them and hands out advice to the lovesick old Cyrano.
Complicating matters are a playboy mechanic (Jim Sturgess) and a 19th-century automaton straight out of Hugo.
Add a Hugo-esque robot, a dwarf with a perfect mathematical memory and a thick air of moody, gloomy, swooning romance and you get one (im)perfect storm of cinematic oddity c/o Italian writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore, best known for his charming cinematic love letter Cinema Paradiso (1988).
Though it begs for a little lightening up, a moment of irony, a wink at the audience, this dead-serious fairy tale about a mysterious young woman (and a phantom automaton straight out of Hugo) is worth watching for Geoffrey Rush’s sensitive, never pandering performance as an effete master auctioneer who gradually discovers he has a heart.
Such a blunt, shorthand approach to characterization works just fine in a goofy fantasy (Edward Scissorhands, say), but it tends to clang in a more naturalistic context, especially when combined with an illustrative surname like Oldman, meant to remind the viewer that a May-December romance is taking place.
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Oldman likes to sit in his ladies-only gallery and gawk, a 60-year-old virgin who just likes to watch and be with his forbidden fruit the way art lovin' assassin Clint Eastwood did in "The Eiger Sanction."
It ends up as a lame Brian De Palma knockoff, more "Femme Fatale" than "Blow Out."
It ends up as a lame Brian De Palma knockoff, more "Femme Fatale" than "Blow Out."
There's the forgery theme, there's the automaton theme and its questions of life and identity, all of which were handled better in " Certified Copy " and " Hugo ", not to mention dystopian noir melodramas like " Blade Runner ".
Its pained interrogation of art, beauty, December love, truth and falsity has a Death in Venice lugubriousness, and not for nothing is the main character called Oldman.
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This Hitchcock homage, written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (of Cinema Paradiso fame), is a creepy, weird, captivating, endearingly awkward concoction, a precious thing of gimmicky preposterousness that one can imagine Brian De Palma going to town with.
Shooting in Rome, Milan, Trieste, Vienna and Prague, Italian writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore (“The Legend of 1900,” “Cinema Paradiso”) designs beautiful sets around Virgil, who holds the screen in nearly every shot.
Directed and written by Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”), the film creates an appealingly uncompromising protagonist and a lush sense of suspense straight out of a 1940s film like “Suspicion” or “Rebecca.”
"The Best Offer" is the first all-English feature from Giuseppe Tornatore, the writer-director who won an Academy Award for "Cinema Paradiso."
Although writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso,” “Everybody’s Fine”) certainly puts his own stamp on the intriguing art-world thriller “The Best Offer,” there’s an effective dash of Hitchcock and even a soupçon of 1970s-era De Palma (remember “Obsession”?)
A storyline that never quite delivers and some clunky dialogue derail the initial promise of Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore’s first English-language feature, a quirky art-world drama set in some unnamed Mitteleuropean city.
Although writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore ("Cinema Paradiso," "Everybody's Fine") certainly puts his own stamp on the intriguing art-world thriller "The Best Offer," there's an effective dash of Hitchcock and even a soupçon of 1970s-era De Palma (remember "Obsession"?)
His latest, which takes place in a generic European city, looks set to introduce a collision of pathologies, or at least some overwrought dueling like his Depardieu-Polanski face-off, “A Pure Formality” (1995).
As in the director’s A Pure Formality andThe Unknown Woman, the anonymous location “somewhere in Europe” makes it easier to accept an international cast speaking English.
All the same, Rush has a lot of fun with Oldman’s gradual thaw, and the questions the movie raises about authenticity and deception, while not remotely in the same heady league as those in Certified Copy, nonetheless allow it to conclude on a satisfyingly ambiguous note.