FILM REVIEW : THE BEST OFFER 

Italian movies have infallibly titillated and enthralled the strong throngs in both hemispheres, and even the unrivalled masterminds have been blown off with their cabalistic mysteries. Set in Europe in the ambience of Art Auctions, Giuseppe Tornatore’s “The Best Offer” is a classic old world mystery of art and heart. Shot in Italy, Vienna and Prague, the movie has amplified the skyline with its sprawling cinematography encircling rich settings and resplendent art pieces and antique collections. The movie chisels out an amorphous adroitness over wealth, art and passion and huddles them together in the tapered silver thread of human miasma. The movie trails a colourful, flashy intrigue where the protagonist - the master art auctioneer gradually discovers that he has a heart. 

As the movie plumps in , we find Virgil Oldman, a man of seventy five (played by Geoffrey Rush) as a lonely and crabby art connoisseur who had spent his lifespan in learning his trade. Virgil Oldman is cast as the epitome of sophistication and reverence at the late dusk of his life. It is said that Oldman admires women but fears them more and unfortunately seems not to have been blessed with any female presence throughout his life. 

One of the substantial highlights of the movie is the secret chamber Oldman holds in his home which embraces hundreds of spellbinding women portraits in various hues which he has stashed away, including the famous paintings of Raphael, Velasquez and many more. Oldman had been downplaying paintings which had interested him in auctions through his accomplice Billy Whistler ( Donald Sutherland ). Though the underhand gimmicks of Oldman is revealed to us, the audience still could side with the chief character for the reverence and adoration he has towards women and for women portraits. Oldman has no schemes to resell these paintings and on the other hand he enjoys by basking in the marvel and glory of all these portraits in his secret chamber during his leisure.

The plot takes its unforeseen spin when a lady of 27 named Claire Ibbetson ( Silvia Hocks ), an heiress to an opulent villa in the locality, rings up Oldman to sell the antique pieces and art paintings at her princely mansion. The deal of the auction sets to roll in though Ibbetson still remains behind the curtains. With his each visit to the mansion, Oldman meets an Assistant to help him out, sent by Ibbetson where she continues to be a magical mystery. Powerless to camouflage his curiosity, Oldman asks the Assistant of Ibbetson, her particulars. To his stupefaction, the Assistant too claims that he has never seen Ms. Ibbetson during his tenure of ten years at their household. Escalated to the steeple of curiosity, Oldman gets more and more interested in Ibbetson and his focus slowly but surely shifts to the unseen, unknown mysterious woman. To have a glimpse of her once and to fetch out the reasons for her behind-the-veil nature turns out to be the deepest obsession in the mind of Oldman. Thus the movie trudges on with the mysterious woman and the mystery behind her. 

The subsequent part of the movie does adduce a clear cut suspense in a breath taking circuit with multiple strings fit at the right slots. To reproduce the mystery will be to stab the bag of essence of the plot, which I leave in its totality, to my readers. Along with the master performance of Geoffrey Rush as Virgil Oldman, Jim Sturgess as Robert, the mechanic and Billy Whistler as a close companion of Oldman , the movie strikes a crystallised equilibrium of emotions in acquaintances as well as friendships. The female Universe that Oldman had generated with numerous female portraits stand to be a vivid testimony for the smooth, soothing sequel that the spectators derive from the characterisation of Virgil Oldman. Moreover, the female province created out of multifarious portraits reverberate once more the magniloquence of the setting that has been cast all through the movie. The rich art pieces, the stunning backdrop of the scenes, the mastery and dialogue delivery of the shots, the opulent costumes and the unrelenting artistic enacting of the characters, bring an elegant uniqueness to the entire mechanism of the storyline. The Best Offer turns out to be a movie that one should never fail to hit if one can profess her/himself to be a champion of aesthetics or a patron of arts.

A. KRISHNA SUNDER