99 min | R | March 6, 2020 | Sony Pictures Classics
An art critic who lectures tourists on the power of his own words gets a job offer he cannot refuse. A rich collector wants him to steal a painting from a reclusive legend living on the estate. The con is everywhere, and the critic is the easiest mark in the room.
James Figueras is an art critic in Milan who opens the film lecturing a room of tourists on how a critic’s words can turn a worthless painting into a masterpiece. He meets Berenice Hollis, an American passing through, and the two fall into bed within hours. A wealthy collector named Joseph Cassidy summons Figueras to his estate on Lake Como. The price of admission is a job. Cassidy wants Figueras to steal a canvas from Jerome Debney, a reclusive painter who lives on the grounds and has not sold a work in decades. The film is about the critic as parasite and about the distance between art and the words people build around it.
Claes Bang plays Figueras with a salesman’s polish that curdles into desperation. He is a man who has talked his way through life and now finds the talking running out. Elizabeth Debicki plays Berenice with a flat watchfulness that keeps the character unreadable. She asks the questions everyone else is too greedy to ask. Mick Jagger plays Cassidy with reptilian ease, all teeth and patience, a predator who never raises his voice. Donald Sutherland plays Debney as a man who has made peace with obscurity and sees through Figueras the moment they meet.
Giuseppe Capotondi directs from a screenplay by Scott B. Smith, adapted from the Charles Willeford novel. The film looks expensive and warm. Lake Como glows in the summer light and the villa interiors trap the characters in tasteful rooms that function as cages. Capotondi builds the whole film around the logic of Figueras’s opening lecture and returns to it at the end. The trick is that the audience performs the same act of interpretation the lecture describes. The score stays restrained and lets the conversations carry the menace.
The first half works as a slow seduction. Three con artists circle each other and the audience tries to guess who is playing whom. The back half cannot sustain the setup. Once the thriller machinery engages, the film reaches for tragedy and lands on contrivance, and the ideas about art and authenticity get crushed under plot. What remains is a handsome, talky chamber piece that is sharpest when nobody does anything but lie to each other. The film skewers the pretensions of the art world and then borrows a few of them on the way out.