Showing On 4, 6, 7 May
Monday 6:00pm, Wednesday 4:00pm and 6:30pm, Thursday 6:00pm
Watch The Trailer
Storyline (warning: spoilers)
In the cutthroat world of art auctions, where a single painting can reap millions in commissions for powerhouse institutions like Christie’s or Sotheby’s, there’s little room for error and perhaps even less room for ethics.
It’s all the more surprising, then, that French writer-director Pascal Bonitzer’s new film, Auction (Le Tableau Volé in French), is a story in which human virtue somehow manages to prevail, even if it takes a while for it to show its pretty face.
When André Masson, a cynical and impeccably tailored auctioneer at the prestigious but fictitious Scottie's auction house, receives a letter claiming that an Egon Schiele masterpiece has turned up in the modest Mulhouse home of a young factory worker, his first instinct is to dismiss it as a fantasy. He makes the trip anyway - and what he finds could be the coup of his career, or its undoing. The painting, it seems, has been missing since 1939, looted by the Nazis from a Jewish family.
Alex Lutz is magnetic as the abrasive Masson, ably partnered by Léa Drucker, Louise Chevillotte, Nora Hamzawi, and a quietly affecting Arcadi Radeff.
Pascal Bonitzer (a longtime collaborator of Jacques Rivette and Raoul Ruiz, to whom the title nods) draws on the remarkable true story of Schiele's Sunflowers, rediscovered in Alsace in 2005 after going missing in 1942, for inspiration.
What unfolds is part comedy of manners, part moral reckoning - a tart, elegantly written ensemble piece that peels back the velvet curtain on the art market's competitive ferocity while asking quieter questions about restitution, inheritance, and who gets transformed along the way.