The Best Offer (2013)

Giuseppe Tornatore's The Best Offer arrives from 2013 with the confidence of a film that has no interest in the cultural weather of its moment. Geoffrey Rush plays Virgil Oldman, an auctioneer who wears gloves, avoids telephones, and keeps a secret vault of portraits acquired through a shill. It is a story about forgery, obsession, and the price of authenticity, told in the stately European manner Tornatore has refined across four decades. Ennio Morricone supplies the score. Nobody in the frame is asked to represent anything larger than themselves, which is either a relief or an anachronism depending on the mood of the viewer.

The plot turns on Claire, an agoraphobic heiress voiced through a locked door, and on a mechanical automaton that Virgil and a young restorer named Robert reassemble from scattered eighteenth-century parts. The film treats Claire's condition as a romantic mystery and Robert's facility with women as a tutorial in courtship. A woman with savant syndrome appears late to deliver the crucial revelation about the villa's true tenant, and the screenplay uses her as a key to a lock, nothing more. Race, class, and environment never enter the conversation. The art market is corrupt, but the film declines to draw any conclusion about capital from that observation.

What we have, then, is a handsomely mounted con picture with a melancholy final image of a man waiting alone in a Prague restaurant. Its social consciousness is essentially nil, and it seems untroubled by the fact. The cast is overwhelmingly European and white, with Liya Kebede and Kiruna Stamell in incidental roles that carry no rhetorical freight. This is not a film that lectures. It deceives, elegantly, and then leaves us at the table.