PUT simply, and having regard to the propensity of filmmakers to gild their current lilies, Simon Curtis’ film about the provenance, history and ownership of a spectacular painting is a lovely movie telling a powerful story.
In pre-war Vienna the Bloch-Bauer family, wealthy, cultured, compassionate and Jewish, engaged Gustav Klimt to paint a formal portrait of their daughter Adele.
Klimt used gold leaf rather than paint to depict Adele’s gown. By any measure it’s a major portrait. In a brief sequence in “Ex Machina”, a print of it hangs on the wall of the rich man’s house.
In 1938 Hitler’s jack-booted bullies imposed the Anschluss on Austria. Beside initiating the persecution of the Jewish population that became the holocaust, they looted the country’s treasures, including many of Klimt’s paintings, in particular, “Woman in Gold”. Adele’s niece Maria fled with her husband to the US. After the war, the painting hung in Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery where the Austrian public regarded it as their country’s “Mona Lisa” doppelganger.
In 1998, Maria (Helen Mirren) and lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) embark on a quest to pry it loose from the Belvedere. The film perforce must compress the next eight years of legal disputation into brief screen time. The journey toward an outcome, of which we are already aware, is quietly exciting.
The film derives much of its narrative from the book that Schoenberg (the composer’s grandson) wrote, presumably in collaboration with Maria, before her death in 2011 aged 94. It may decorate events, but there is acceptable verity in its depiction of what’s on record. Helen Mirren, in her 69th year playing Maria, looks striking and her performance is, as you might expect, a delight to watch.
At all cinemas
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