Dir. Raul Ruiz, 2006, Austria/France/UK, 127 mins
Cast: John Malkovich, Veronica Ferres, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Dillane
Review by Zoë J Griffiths
In turn-of-the-century Paris and Vienna, Gustav Klimt (a wonderfully beardy John Malkovich) slowly loses his mind to syphilis, art and love.
The film opens in 1918, as Klimt lies on his deathbed in Vienna, visited by his protégé, the tortured painter, Egon Schiele. The rest of the action consists of the former artist's feverish visions of his earlier life, transporting us away from the hospital littered with the casualties of war to the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, where Klimt is awarded the gold medal for his work entitled 'Philosophy'.
Klimt's visions are filled with many women - from his models, his mother and sister, to his long-term lover, Emilie Flöge, played by German actress, Veronica Ferres, and his elusive muse, the gorgeous Saffron Burrows. As the model, Lea de Castro, Burrows sparkles each time she comes on screen with a naughty, flirtatious wit; a good foil to Malkovich's pessimistic, quietly exasperated Klimt. It's easy to understand how Klimt's obsession with her develops – the minute she's gone, we're waiting for the next time she's back on set too.
A second figure also haunts the film; that of the ambiguous 'Secretary' character, played by Stephen Dillane. Part-father figure, part-manager, part-government spy, part-Mephistophelean reminder of what's to come, he seems invisible to the rest of the cast, and his sporadic appearances remain totally unexplained at the end of the film.
In fact, far from holding a linear plot, Ruiz's film is instead a suite of confusing occurrences, many left neither concluded nor explained. The pervasive dreamlike quality of the film only adds to the sense that we're being made privy to the 'life flashing before my eyes' cliche of a man's madness on his deathbed.
As you'd expect from a film about artists, there's a great deal of 'looking' in the film. Mirrors, binoculars and windows provide the director with many ways of distorting our visions of reality, or creating an alternative reality. The film is absolutely beautiful to look at; costumes and sets are works of art themselves, and it seems every single frame is constructed like a painting, and drenched with colour and light reflecting art deco style of the time. In Cinematography terms, the film echoes Peter Webber's The Girl with the Pearl Earring, but dragged forwards to a more decadent time.
Unfortunately, it falls short of Webber's work. The lack of a storyline makes it quite difficult to connect with Malkovich's confusing/confused Klimt, and as a sumptuous study of madness and the art of the time, at over two hours, it's hard to remain engaged throughout. A truly pan-European film (filmed on location in Vienna and Cologne and boasting a production co-operative from Vienna, Germany, France and England), it nevertheless suffers from the same dreadful fabricated 'Euro-accent' from its secondary characters that grated so much in another recent artist's biopic, Goya's Ghosts.
Despite these quibbles, regularly not knowing what's going on, and seemingly teetering on the brink of something significant happening throughout (it doesn't), there's something enjoyable about Klimt. It's a deliberately ''arty', filmmakers film; sexy, stylised and lacking in depth - as the director, Ruiz, hoped, rather like one of Klimt's paintings.
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