La Migliore Offerta (2013)

"Lambert are you married ?"
"Yes. Nearly 30 years."
"What's it like, living with a woman?"
"Like taking part in an auction. You never know if yours will be the best offer."

I've reached again Friday without any options available for a blog entry. Therefore, I decided to throw a look on the European Film Awards given last week, to see if I can find something interesting. Since the main winner, "La grande bellezza", seemed dangerous enough to completely bury my already lately awful mood, I picked another Italian production among the nominees - "La migliore offerta". Horrible error ... beautiful movie ...

I don't really know how to start this, at the current impossible hour, after a "sleep-cutting" movie ... and topping all with some dizziness (no, I didn't get my hands on any bottle yet, although I'm quite tempted). I'll try a more ... lighthearted approach, although it's not that easy = I don't know what follows. But let's try to be pragmatic for starters ... As the beginning quote suggests, the movie is a coproduction, the dialogue being in English. The main character in the story is Virgil Oldman, the owner and lead manager of a successful auction house, a guy that passed his youth, expert evaluator in paintings and antiques, quite lonely, eccentric, and with a consistent fortune gathered through the business he's leading. One day he's getting a request from a young woman, Claire Ibbetson, to evaluate the goods she inherited from her late parents, objects stacked somewhere in an old villa. Although reluctant, he finally accepts but .. ends up waiting in the rain for 40 minutes in front of a closed gate (don't worry, in movie minutes is a shorter time). The client calls again though, and after complicated excuses and tearful insistence she manages to get a second meeting appointment. Surprise again, the young lady is not present at the place .. again. However, the gate is opened by a guy employed to take care of the house, who's instructed to give details to our auctioneer. Point where mister Oldman discovers two things: 1) his client was not seen by anybody for years, apparently suffering of agoraphobia and 2) in the basement of the building are lying around some contraptions which are apparently pieces of an old, unique and expensive humanoid automaton.

That's enough. I shouldn't tell more from the subject. The movie is .. painfully predictable, where "painfully" doesn't refer to the fact of being predictable, but to what you don't want to happen and you know it will. As suggested between the lines by the opening quote, the story takes at some point a turn to a romance .. between a sort of weird guy who meets an apparently even weirder girl. I'm not really in the mood now (and I think I didn't have a proper mood for that in years, so it won't happen soon) to get into details about the potential complicated twists arising in such context, either in the movie (which anyway would generate a flood of spoilers) or situation-wise by itself. What can I do is to get back to the script. I doubt the writing has much purpose in not disclosing the ending. However, it manages to discreetly hide many many other aspects, which if discovered, considerably amplify the impact of the final part. I could start with the automaton construction, that progresses in parallel with the main character "deconstruction", and I could go down to minor stuff like the allegory in choosing the character names - Virgil + Oldman vs. Claire + Ibbetson. I might be rambling without any accuracy here, but give a thought on it after seeing the movie (before it doesn't tell you anything anyway), and if you only have the last name for which you still don't find an allegoric sense just google for "Peter Ibbetson".

Let me get a bit into the production part. Practically the movie has Giuseppe Tornatore written all over it in big letters. For me he's still the best Italian director at the moment, although I seldom see Italian movies. The script is also written by him, and I'll just add that, besides the recently watched "Prisoners" (on a total different niche though), it's probably one of the most intelligent I've seen in the last years (although it's not plothole free). About the actors .. well, good and bad - Geoffrey Rush makes a good role, but he seemed a bit too theatrical for me in some scenes. An interesting surprise was Sylvia Hoeks who initially seemed to be amateurishly inexpressive, but the story gradually explains a lot ... Technically, the cinematography (Fabio Zamarion) is probably the best I've seen this year in a non-action movie (by the way, talking about "Prisoners", what Roger Deakins did there is left behind by far, at least on framing and chromatic-wise, because on the visual space of expression the movies are not the same). The score, probably the best Morricone product since "Untouchables", follows a pretty calm theme, but it has also some vocal nuances which make it feel uneasy at some points (as a positive remark).

I'll get back to the opening quote ... It's just an out-of-context discussion with a secondary character in the movie, apparently unrelated to the main action. However, you can get some sense of it at some point after the credits end, if you take a minute to reflect on "the best offer". Maybe you don't know if it's the best, but what does it mean to be the best ? Is it too low, or too high ? Do you need the object after all, or not ? Do you know for sure if you bid for an original, or maybe for a fake ? Finally though .. "There's something authentic in every forgery." And how bitter it might be, maybe sometimes it's better if you managed to bid "the best offer" and won that small something ;) Just pay attention it's not getting too expensive, because it can ...

Rating: 4 out of 5