The Burnt Orange Heresy | Little White Lies

The Burnt Orange Heresy

29 Oct 2020 / Released: 30 Oct 2020

A woman in a patterned dress sitting at a table, looking at a man across from her.
A woman in a patterned dress sitting at a table, looking at a man across from her.
3

Anticipation.

The title’s certainly intriguing. And that’s an appealing cast list right there.

3

Enjoyment.

Takes itself a little too seriously to be truly enjoyable.

3

In Retrospect.

It’s well put together, fun performances, and could maybe stand the scrutiny of a rewatch.

This aus­tere art­world thriller, star­ring Eliz­a­beth Debic­ki and Claes Bang, could’ve done with a lit­tle more humour.

It was Jean-Luc Godard who came up with the famous quote about film being truth 24 times per sec­ond,” and then Bri­an de Pal­ma (a Godard super­fan) lat­er coun­tered that by stat­ing that film is, in fact, lies 24 times a sec­ond.” Both are cor­rect, and both state­ments no doubt gave rise to a mil­lion under­grad­u­ate arts the­ses regard­ing the slip­pery nature of truth in art and the unmedi­at­ed inten­tions of the artist. Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Burnt Orange Heresy, adapt­ed from Charles Willeford’s 1971 nov­el, is anoth­er the­sis to slap on the pile.

This fid­dly art­world thriller intro­duces us to Claes Bang’s pill-pop­ping celebri­ty art crit­ic James Figueras, who is in the midst of his tour­ing lec­ture on the impos­si­bil­i­ty of know­ing an artist’s moti­va­tions when it comes to cre­at­ing art. Push­ing that idea fur­ther, he says that this very ambi­gu­i­ty makes it easy for fop­pish char­la­tans like him­self to impose sub­jec­tive mean­ing onto a work which is then accept­ed as fact – through knowl­edge and con­fi­dence comes doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry, even when it’s com­plete­ly false.

Intimate couple embracing on bed in bedroom setting.

He draws the atten­tion of svelte art­world hang­er-on Berenice (Eliz­a­beth Debic­ki) and, fol­low­ing a casu­al bunk-up, he invites her along to Lake Como for a meet­ing with art deal­er pal Joseph Cas­sidy who is hatch­ing a devi­ous scheme to secure a price­less paint­ing. The deal­er is played by none oth­er than Mick Jag­ger, and he’s very enter­tain­ing in that, as an actor, he is unable to play any­thing oth­er than a ver­sion of him­self, which is a threat­en­ing­ly effete lizard-man hybrid.

We’re then intro­duced to Don­ald Sutherland’s enig­mat­ic and aggres­sive­ly unpro­duc­tive con­cep­tu­al artist Jerome Deb­ney, whose infamy arose when, 50 years ago, a gallery burnt down tak­ing all his paint­ings with it, and so he hung an emp­ty frame on the charred walls and instant celebri­ty was his prize. Cas­sidy has become Debney’s finan­cial keep­er, but his eye remains on procur­ing what work Deb­ney has com­plet­ed (and kept hid­den) in the inter­ven­ing half cen­tu­ry. Figueras, under the guise of writ­ing an arti­cle on Deb­ney, is giv­en the task of look­ing at the artist’s secret trove to see if there are any juicy morsels ready for the auc­tion slab.

Man in a light-coloured suit and patterned tie sitting at a table.

It’s an inter­est­ing set-up, con­trived to the point of light fan­ta­sy, but always kept with­in the realms of the fan­ci­ful­ly believ­able. Bang is hard­ly push­ing the boat out with his smirk­ing take on a self-serv­ing art­world shit (it’s a very sim­i­lar role his one in Ruben Östlund’s The Square), while Suther­land doesn’t real­ly have to work his mus­cles too much to bring a mous­tache-twirling intel­lec­tu­al painter into being. Debicki’s char­ac­ter is the sole unknown quan­ti­ty here, as work­ing out the obscure nature of her pres­ence in this com­plex dra­mat­ic equa­tion is far more edi­fy­ing than keep­ing up with all the bloat­ed blath­er about, A ha, but is it art dear boy?”

It’s a fit­ful­ly enter­tain­ing 90-minute runaround, and Capo­ton­di directs with a slick, func­tion­al econ­o­my which sits just on the right side of gloss­i­ly styl­ish. A lit­tle like when you see social media depict­ed in films (as in, it’s always just a few steps behind the hor­rif­ic real­i­ty), there’s some­thing false about the film’s rar­i­fied, intel­lec­tu­alised depic­tion of the art world which doesn’t feel like it’s based on any­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly real, rel­e­vant or relat­able. It’s a world pitched as pseuds ver­sus suck­ers, and it just makes some of the story’s more eccen­tric twists quite hard to swallow.

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