Art-related movies fascinate me. Biographies of artists, the fate of famous paintings, spectacular heists of art objects or dramas from the world of artists or collectors have generated successful and good quality films. ‘Le tabeau volé‘ (English distribution title is ‘Auction’), the film by French director and screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer, adds to this collection (apt metaphor!) with a not very friendly display of the world of art auctions. Situated somewhere between docu-drama and comedy, the film is inspired by a real event that happened almost two decades ago – the finding in Mulhouse, France, of a very valuable painting by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele, lost at the beginning of World War II along with an entire collection of works of art belonging to a family of Austrian Jews who were refugees from Nazi persecution. Starting from this real event, Bonitzer imagined a gallery of characters with their problems and interests, not all related to art or the passion for beauty. The result is not all that it could have been, but the film is quite interesting and not only for art lovers.
The story of the discovery, recovery and sale of the famous painting is composed of several narrative planes, and this cannot be accidental, since Pascal Bonitzer has a filmography that includes six times more screenplays he wrote than films that he directed. The central character is André Masson, a very competent and rather unsympathetic art expert who works for a large auction house. His assistant is Aurore, a young intern who has a complicated family history that exposed her to the corrupt world of auctions. Bertina, André’s ex-wife, is the expert with whom he will authenticate the painting and convince those who had kept it without being aware of its value to put it up for sale, for the benefit of the descendants of the family that was deprived of its wealth during the Holocaust. All of these and a few other secondary characters will be involved in a rather interesting plot, but which does not seem to have been the focus of the screenwriter and director Bonitzer.
The revelations behind the scenes of the world of art auctions will captivate many viewers. The actors are very well chosen. Alex Lutz is an actor that I do not remember seeing in important roles. His André Masson is ambiguous and I could not decide whether to hate him or to love him and I liked that. Watching Léa Drucker again is always a pleasure. I also really liked the young Louise Chevillotte, who fit very well into the role of the vulnerable intern, in a relationship of admiration and antipathy with her boss, revealing at the right time a life experience that proves to be critical. There are a few other interesting heroes, but I think that precisely this diversity of characters and themes, sketched but not deepened, is the main problem of the film. The multiplication of narrative planes and life stories, which in many other cases represent a quality, creates in ‘Le tabeau volé‘ a feeling of lack of focus. Some characters disappear just when we had begun to be interested in their fate. The ending also seemed a little forced and conventional to me. All of this makes the difference between the interesting and enjoyable film that ‘Le tabeau volé‘ is and the very good film that it could have been.