In the opening scene of Auction, a French drama set in the lofty world of the fine art market, auctioneer André Masson (Alex Lutz) visits the home of a potential seller of a desired artwork. This client — bitter, vindictive to her own family and imperturbably racist — is nobody’s ideal partner, but business is business. And she’s credited with one of the film’s more memorable lines: “An auctioneer is like a plastic surgeon. You have to trust him.”
It’s an apt metaphor for Auction, the ninth film from critic-turned-director Pascal Bonitzer, who also co-wrote the script with Iliana Lolic. There’s something unavoidably procedural, perhaps even antiseptic, about this not-quite satire, not-quite polemic on the capitalist corruption of priceless works of art.
It’s why the surgical metaphor feels more appropriate than a later analogy, when André’s appraiser and ex-wife Bertina (Léa Drucker) compares his auctioneering ability to that of a conductor. If only the film carried any of the lyrical gravitas of an orchestral composition. But Bonitzer’s approach utilizes a scalpel, not a baton, and if you’re anything like this viewer, you’ll find that the film’s aesthetic beauty — it’s set almost entirely in the elegant, art-filled interiors of Parisian homes and office buildings — can’t gloss over the unsatisfying conclusion that there isn’t enough there there.
The central storyline of Auction involves the discovery, in the home of a working-class family in Mulhouse, France, of a still-life by the prized Austrian painter Egon Schiele. André is skeptical of the inquiry — he believes all known Schieles have been homed in museums for decades — but follows up, and discovers not only the work’s authenticity but its troubling provenance, as one of countless canvases looted by Nazis as “degenerate art.”
The artwork is worth potentially more than $10 million, André estimates to the family, though they can expect to recoup only a fraction of its sale, for the painting legally must be returned to its proper heir, Bob Wahlberg (Doug Rand), an American businessman whose late father owned the painting before it was confiscated by the Third Reich.
Alongside the legal maneuvering and underhanded power plays involved in the painting’s changing of hands, a subplot emerges involving Aurore (Louise Chevillotte), André’s intern, who harbors an elusive relationship with the truth. She lies so strategically and habitually — about everything from her paternity to how she acquired a fur coat — that when she arrives at André’s apartment with a solution to an escalating problem, anyone would question the veracity of her claims.
I suppose that through Aurore’s enigmatic identity, and the doubts she casts on her own genetic history, Bonitzer is drawing a parallel between the provenance of a painting and that of a person; both can prove slippery and manipulable. But the film mostly jettisons Aurore’s story, which recedes into the background and never fully comes into focus. Instead, Auction’s apex of tension arises over whether or not Bob Wahlberg will sell the painting to an unscrupulous private buyer before it can reach the auction block. The financial stakes may be high for a few Parisian elitists, but the emotional stakes are stubbornly absent.
The movie’s most salient points are the ones most of us inherently grasp: that the purported price of an item instantly changes our perception of it, that nothing is sacred among the vulturine players of the economy’s uppermost echelons, that artistic merit and commercial value are two different things indeed.
But if you’re the sort that follows the goings-on at Christie’s and Sotheby’s with rapt attention, you’ll likely find kinship in a film brimming with formal realism, that captures its milieu with a knowing attend to detail. The rest of us are probably “out” before the proverbial opening bid.
AUCTION. Director: Pascal Bonitzer; Cast: Alex Lutz, Léa Drucker, Louise Chevillotte, Nora Hamzawi, Arcadi Radeff; Distributor: Menemsha Films; in French (with subtitles) and English. Opens: Friday, Dec. 5 at Movies of Lake Worth, Movies of Delray and Coral Gables Art Cinema