The Best Offer

Synopsis: Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) runs a lucrative business somewhere in Italy as aq valuer and auctioneer of high end antiques and art. One day he is contacted by mysterious heiress asking him to value and dispose of the art and antiques in her familial home. It is a phone call that will change his life.

As a literary conceit Giuseppe Tornatore's The Best Offer, which he wrote, is quite beguiling. Translated onto the screen it is anything but, maintaining a reasonably steady focus for the first hour before coming seriously unstuck in the second. The problem is that what might work given the indulgence of the imagination just doesn’t when subject to the constraints of naturalistic cinema.

Tornatore opens his film by introducing us to his main character, Virgil Oldman, a pedantic neurotic with a larcenous streak, pathologically distant from real human contact, women especially (he is a virgin) and instead immuring himself in his luxurious apartment with his breathtaking collection of female portraits from across the centuries, much of which he has assembled with the help of his crony, Billy (Donald Sutherland).  He then engages him with his emotional counterpart, Claire Ibbotson (Sylvia Hoeks), a pathologically reclusive heiress who refuses to emerge from her concealed quarters.  In between he inserts young  whizz mechanic, Robert (Jim Sturgess), whom Virgil gets to rebuild an automaton and from whom he seeks advice on the art of seduction as he gradually begins to desire his mysterious employer.

If all this is rather ponderously assembled, with a rather too obvious scent of a forthcoming twist in the air, once Virgil makes contact with Claire the film descends into the bathetic. Any trace of psychological realism evaporates in a surge of Barbara Cartlandish romanticism as in a ridiculously Euro-kitsch scene Claire dons high heels and designer gear to please the drooling Virgil.  The last portion of the film depicts Virgil’s long anticipated downfall with economy although perhaps a little cavalierly so for some.

Tornatore has a taste for the darker regions of the soul, as is evidenced by his excellent 1999 film Un Pure Formalité. The Best Offer is in similar territory but Tornatore’s way of handling them is ham-fisted and occasionally perplexing.  OK, it’s an English language film but why Jim Sturgess? Let’s accept him as an ex-pat Pom but why are his customers English and why is the bar across the road from Claire’s villa run by and patronized by more native-speaking English? 

Rush, understandably given the literary script with what is perhaps its uniquely Italian romanticism, flounders around, in his comfort zone as the uptight Virgil but uncomfortable when called upon to show his emotions whilst Hoeks is simply a standard issue pretty face and adds nothing of interest to proceedings and Burgess’s Robert is no more than a plot device to allow Tornatore to explain what is going on.

Whislt one can't underestimate the difficulties he might have experienced working in English, unlike with Un Pure Formalité Tornatore can’t reconcile the imaginary aspects of his story (the kindest interpretation of it is that it represents Virgil's post-breakdown fantasy) with the expectations of real life logic and glibly ditches the latter in favour of the former. The result is that, at least from a more skeptical Anglo-Celtic point-of-view, nothing adds up and Virgil’s rise and fall is an empty transfiguration (compare for instance, Von Aschenbach’s not-dissimilar emotional journey in Visconti’s Death In Venice). 

The Best Offer is a visually mouth-watering film and anyone with a love of fine art and furnishings will delight in the production and art design (Maurizio Sabatini and Andrea Di Palma, respectively). But for the rest, whilst Tornatore’s ideas are strong, his realization of them is underwhelming and, sometimes, simply clumsy.

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