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The Best Offer (2013)

Posted By: Someonelse
The Best Offer (2013)

La Migliore Offerta (2013)
A Film by Giuseppe Tornatore
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 16:9 | Cover + DVD Scan | 02:05:43 | 7,10 Gb
Audio: English, Italian - AC3 5.1 @ 384 Kbps (each) | Subs: Italian SDH
Genre: Drama, Romance

Director: Giuseppe Tornatore

A beautiful thriller that has more elements of mystery and romance than of the thriller that revolves around an auctioneer who has an insane collection of paintings of women. Tornatore manages to portray this lonely man in a perfect manner, even a bit too exaggerated towards the extent of that loneliness as well as the overall plot is a little bit confusing in terms of how the plan is carried out at the end, and how everything gets screwed over so suddenly and so painfully. Still, this film has gorgeous work of art and a spectacular art direction, it has Geoffrey Rush giving a nice performance: strong and emotional, and it keeps your interest, even if it's 2 hours long, and that is something to applaud.

IMDB

Putting aside the Sicilian thread that runs from Nuovo Cinema Paradiso to Baaria, writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore gets his cultural baggage out of the attic for a classic Old World mystery set in Europe’s high-rolling art world. The Best Offer chisels a complicated intrigue out of an amorphous atmosphere of neurosis, wealth, and sophistication. Its pained interrogation of art, beauty, December love, truth and falsity has a Death in Venice lugubriousness, and not for nothing is the main character called Oldman. Though it begs for a little lightening up, a moment of irony, a wink at the audience, this dead-serious fairy tale about a mysterious young woman (and a phantom automaton straight out of Hugo) is worth watching for Geoffrey Rush’s sensitive, never pandering performance as an effete master auctioneer who gradually discovers he has a heart. Massive production values tend to overpower the story, but they could be an added attraction for the cultivated audiences the Warner Bros Italia release is targeted at.

The Best Offer (2013)

Shot all over northern Italy, Vienna and Prague, the film’s precise setting is deliberately left a blank. As in the director’s A Pure Formality and The Unknown Woman, the anonymous location “somewhere in Europe” makes it easier to accept an international cast speaking English. Lonely, crabby aesthete Virgil Oldman (Rush) has spent a lifetime learning his trade: he can spot a Louis XIV at twenty paces and sell Galileo’s personal telescope for millions in a few minutes on the auction floor. Claiming to “admire but fear women,” he has never had a relationship in his life. Until, that is, he meets Claire Ibbotson (Sylvia Hoeks), heiress to a sprawling villa full of paintings and antiques. She convinces him to evaluate her late parents’ property, which she toys with selling, but because of a mysterious illness withholds her presence from the elderly snob. Finally he becomes obsessed with seeing her at all costs, by any means possible.

The Best Offer (2013)

In the midst of his frustrated longings, he’s filching pieces of rusty mechanical gears from her basement on a hunch. His young friend and mechanical genius Robert (Jim Sturgess) puts them together in delight, watching a priceless 18th century talking automaton emerge (though far too slowly in terms of screen time.) This is not the first sign of Virgil’s dishonest nature. For years he has been downplaying paintings that interest him at auctions and letting his accomplice Billy Whistler (an artistically white-bearded Donald Sutherland) pick them up for a song. A breach of integrity on this scale would be enough to condemn any character, were not Rush a magician at portraying the cranky eccentric as a flawed human being and keeping the audience on his side.

The Best Offer (2013)

The first half of the screenplay works like clockwork, despite some doldrums due to repeating information, but by the second half real slippage begins when Claire decides to reveal herself to Virgil. In the flesh she loses all mystery for the audience, if not for the enamored reformed misanthrope; in Rush’s masterful hands, his late-blooming feelings stir tenderness.

The Best Offer (2013)

Both the good-humored Sutherland and young Sturgess pack a lot into their offbeat characters, giving Virgil somebody to talk to and fight with, while reflecting him in their own dark mirrors. Dutch shooting star Sylvia Hoeks (Tirza) is limber in her first English-language role.

The Best Offer (2013)

Like a woman who puts on all her makeup at once, the combined weight of Italy’s top technicians makes itself felt in Fabio Zamarion’s smoky cinematography, Maurzio Sabatini’s lavishly refined sets, Maurizio Millenotti’s dapper costumes, Ennio Morricone’s heavily used strings. One magic moment which illustrates Tornatore’s visual imagination at its best is Virgil’s secret chamber, a marbled vault hung to the rafters with dozens, maybe hundreds of charming female portraits he has squirreled away, including famous faces by Raphael, Titian and Velasquez. There he spends his pre-Claire evenings, gazing at a female universe he dare not touch in the flesh. It offers a perfect parallel to the famous kissing sequence in Nuovo Cinema Paradiso: the serial emotions of art as life perfected.
The Best Offer (2013)

Giuseppe Tornatore is an acclaimed Italian director of dramas like The Legend of 1900 (La Leggenda del Pianista sull’Oceano), Malena and Cinema Paradiso, which won an Oscar for the best foreign movie in 1990. As 2013 turned out to be a very bad year for movies, it’s comforting that Tornatore made another masterpiece which is clearly the best movie of the year so far. With beautiful filming locations and Ennio Morricone’s excellent soundtrack, The Best Offer also features great actors and an original, interesting story.

The Best Offer (2013)

The Best Offer is a story about an art auctioneer Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush), an older man who doesn’t like people and is obsessed with hygiene, who, one day, gets a call from young Claire Ibetson (Sylvia Hoeks) who wants him to evaluate the furniture in her dead parents’ old villa. They arrange several meetings in the villa, but Claire never shows up, which angers Virgil but, in the meantime, intrigues him so he tries to discover the cause of such behaviour.

The Best Offer (2013)

This movie is a very interesting drama that often manages to grip its viewers, as if it were a thriller – unclear situations, the confusion of the main character with whom the audience empathises and the suitable music perfectly build tension in certain situations. The relaxed scenes of analysing art are wonderfully alternated with the suspense of the main plot. Geoffrey Rush leads us through a story of an old art lover who drastically changes after he realises what he’s been missing all his life, because he’s been living in a bubble. The magistral performance of this acting veteran comes as a refreshment after the whole Pirates of the Caribbean series and his less serious role of captain Barbossa. I should also mention the greatly executed role of Donald Sutherland (as Virgil’s friend Billy) and Jim Sturgess (as the young engineer Robert). The less known Sylvia Hoeks is also very good in portraying the paranoid Claire.

The Best Offer (2013)

The movie was filmed in Italy, Prague and Vienna, on beautiful locations that perfectly fit the entire atmosphere and reflect the characters’ traits – starting from the villa where Clair lives, which seems a bit haunted and is messy, just like Claire herself; to the sterile surroundings where Virgil wanders. The cinematography is praiseworthy. It’s enough to remember the scene in which Virgil sits in a restaurant, alone, and the waiters bring him a cake to celebrate his birthday: Virgil continues to stare at the candle in the cake until it burns out, and the camera films it all from the table, so that the candle always finds itself in the middle of Virgil’s apathetic face. As I said before, the soundtrack was composed by the world-famous Ennio Morricone, which turned out to be marvelous, probably also because of the fact that he’s often worked with Tornatore. In a nutshell, The Best Offer is a movie by a great director, with great actors, that doesn’t seek fame and money, but wants to provide a quality alternative to today’s Hollywood, and it manages to do just that. An absolute recommendation.
The Best Offer (2013)

Special Features:
- Backstage (24:29)

Many Thanks to Original uploader.


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