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BERLINALE 2013 Special Gala / Italy

The Best Offer: nothing better

by 

- After having delighted millions of Italian spectators, Tornatore’s new film brings its elegance and a touch of wonder to Berlin

Millions of Italians have made this observation since January, the audience at the Berlin Film Festival has just had the same chance: each new film written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore is a divine little gem. The Best Offer [+see also:
trailer
film profile
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is no exception. It we separate the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s delightful work into two categories, the vernacular and visceral Sicilian narratives on one hand, the Anglophone adventures bursting with artistic sensitivity and shrouded in marvels on the other, we can place this film in the second batch.

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It tells the unexpected love story between a rich, famous and extremely refined auctioneer called Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush) who always wears gloves, and a secret agoraphobic client, who wants to obtain an estimate of the contents of her vast family manor. For a long time, while discovering all the unexpected tresors hidden in Claire’s (Sylvia Hoeks) collection, he only knows her through her young audacious voice, which enables her from the start to take the important man that he is for a ride. As he continues to unveil the historical (and thus slightly authentic) fakes of one of the only female counterfeiters who ever existed, and aquires for himself the portraits of the world's most beautiful women during his own auctions with the help of Billy (Donald Sutherland), a mediocre painter who is his friend, he follows the advice of another friend, a heartbreaker and expert in all kinds of undertakings, to draw Claire from the other side of the painted wall behind which she has been hiding she was 15 years old. Between the two lonely scholars, delicate feelings, new to both of them, begin to transpire.

The fabulous nature of the narrative is naturally enhanced by those superbly poetic shots whose secret is closely guarded by Tornatore: the dye brush that seems to be used by a painter, the solitary candle left to burn on the cake by the old dandy, the white panel on which the kid gloves are laid... As always with this director, the esthetic repetition of the same thing is always illuminated by a special glow, the bright reflexion of a pupil, for example. The pair are masterfully brought together in the auctioneer's secret room, as beautiful as a series of impetuous kisses at the end of one of the most overwhelming declarations of love ever formulated in a movie. There, the piercing feminine stares from a series of portraits by masters worth millions are offered to him alone. We also sometimes notice, between the legs of a statue or through a tiny aperture, a little eye, discretely spying. You have to keep your eyes wide open in The Best Offer, and as Resnais used to say, you haven’t seen anything yet!

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(Translated from French)

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