Everything you need to know about Pascal Bonitzeris tightly bound”Auction” — an exuberant and byzantine moral comedy set in the trenches of the French art industry — can be inferred from its opening scene. In it, star auctioneer André Masson (Alex Lutz) and his pathological liar of a new intern (Louise Chevillotte as Aurore) visit a blind old woman eager to unload a priceless masterpiece. Does it matter that she is mean to her maid? It doesn’t. Does it matter that she is openly racist, or that she is only selling the painting so that she “bum” of a daughter won’t stand to inherit it when she dies? Not a chance. André will say, do and/or forgive anything as long as it allows him to bring the work to market and make his company a fortune. What a shame that such an exquisite eye for art should be conditioned only to seek profit.
So begins a thought-provoking little storm of a film that repeatedly revolves around the questions posed at its first meeting: Where does art belong, who deserves to own it, and how much do we diminish its value by focusing so much on its cost? These are questions that André — steadfast, lupine, faintly resembles a hollowed out Baryshnikov — has done well by refusing to think. Here’s a guy who so ruthlessly pursues his goal, no matter how bad it makes him look. “Being hated is good for the nerve cells,” he reasons to Aurore as part of a speech about the need for ruthlessness; later, as the intern angrily complains about his boss on the phone, André enters the room as if eager to cheer on Aurora’s frustration.
But André, whom Bonitzer has named after the early surrealist André-Aimé-René Masson, soon confronts our man with a situation that – at least on some distant subconscious level – forces him to reassess his measurements. A lost 1914 Egon Schiele masterpiece is discovered in the house of a young chemical worker in a small factory town along the Swiss border. “Withered Sunflowers,” thought lost during World War II after the Nazis ransacked it, is authentic in more ways than one: In reality, this very piece was found by an unassuming Frenchman in 2005, unaware of its sordid provenance, and eventually sold at auction for more than $13 million.
A young 79-year-old who wrote screenplays for everyone from Jacques Rivette to Paul Verhoeven after coming up as a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma (and has always liked to raise eyebrows at the bourgeoisie), Bonitzer is less interested in the painting itself—about which this film makes almost no comment—than he is in what the painting reveals of the many different people drawn into its orbit. According to French tradition, Bonitzer emphasizes way over moralityand so “Auction” uses André as more of a Dantean tour guide through the underworld of the art business than as a typical hero. Which is to say, this isn’t the story of a greedy, materialistic man who suffers a crisis of conscience when he tries to pry priceless treasure from an uneducated hick who doesn’t know any better.
To isto a degree, exactly what André would like to do, but “Auction” complicates its main character’s trajectory until it resembles less of an arc than a chaotic bidding war. While Martin (Arcadi Radeff), the purposefully innocent factory worker with the “Withered Sunflowers” on his wall, doesn’t seem disinterested in his good fortune, everyone else on André’s path has a very fixed idea of who should profit from it. That includes Martin’s friends, who see this as the point of life, his disarmingly laid-back lawyer (Nora Hamzawi) and the American Jew who claims to represent the rightful heirs to Schiele’s treasure. The situation gets so messy so quickly that André turns to his ex-wife (a playful Léa Drucker as Bertina), of all people, for support; she’s in love with someone new, but also seems fired up by the excitement of a lost Schiele falling into her lap.
As if that wasn’t enough for this 90-minute film to fit into its frame, Bonitzer goes to great lengths to suggest that Aurore might have her own agenda (it’s honestly hard to tell with her), and that André himself is just a tool of the auction house where he works. The action unfolds at the urgent but erratic pace of a life-changing business deal, as Bonitzer carelessly steers us through a series of small rooms as people struggle to decide what is the right thing to do with Schiele’s painting. The more they argue about the value of “Withered Sunflowers,” the more we feel they are forced to wrestle with the value of the argument they are making. Their own value, their own purpose, their own origin.
Instead of dwelling on any particular aspect of what that means, the fast-moving “Auction” — generally sober, but never more than a few degrees away from tipping into a cheeky satire of the characters’ self-importance — creates an elaborate matrix of buried secrets, invented pasts and undeniable histories. Complicated enough to lose a casual viewer but never so convoluted that André and co. sublimated into the system around them (which would have been fatal for a film so attuned to the relationship between personal interest and collective perception), Bonitzer’s plot spins forward with the speed of an auctioneer’s mouth until raw tension becomes suitably insoluble from pointless laughter.
It’s all in good fun, but the film’s core truth is decidedly unshakable: If you agree to play the game, you have to play by its rules. If you let the market determine the price of a boring old canvas, you have to accept the collective judgment of an item’s perceived value. Everyone has a role to play. Only Martin—cast as a Dickensian wretch by Bonitzer’s legion of myopic elites, but always tacitly acting against type—reserves the right to determine his own worth.
Grade: B
“Auction” is now in theaters.
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