The Burnt Orange Heresy movie review: Charged art thriller falls over in final act

With its Lake Como setting and long-limbed, attractive stars, it would be easy to fall under this new movie’s allures.

The Burnt Orange Heresy was so alluring in its first hour, a beautifully composed, sexy art thriller with long-limbed, attractive people sizzling up the screen.

But then something happened.

In its zealous attempt to ape a Patricia Highsmith suspense, it over-calibrated the “thriller” aspects and folded in on itself with a final act that became increasingly more incredulous.

Starring Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Donald Sutherland and Mick Jagger in his first non-cameo role in decades, The Burnt Orange Heresy is adapted from Charles Willeford’s 1971 novel.

It has all the ingredients of a sensual thriller, including some wonderful, impactful performances and a Lake Como setting that beguiles as much as the humans on screen. If only it had showed a touch more restraint.

James Figueras (Bang) is a self-important art critic who waxes lyrical about the role of someone like him as the banks of a river which channels the flow of water – the water in that metaphor being art itself.

The Burnt Orange Heresy is a solid if ultimately under-boiled thriller. Picture: Jose Haro/Sony

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James was of some renown at one point, even publishing a book, but has mostly been subsisting on giving big-noting art lectures to American tourists in Milan.

One of those travellers is Berenice Hollis (Debicki), an American from a midwestern state. She claims to be on holidays and the enigmatic nature of Debicki’s performance fuels some of the paranoia that later manifests in the film.

James is summoned to the Lake Como “summer house” (read: villa of palace proportions) of famous art collector Joseph Cassidy (Jagger), and despite having met only hours earlier, Berenice is invited along.

There, Joseph has a proposal for James. Joseph wants to give James the opportunity to interview Jerome Debney (Sutherland), a reclusive artist whose legend is spawned from a fire which purged all his works decades earlier, leaving behind an empty frame and a message.

In return, Joseph wants what no one else has: a Debney, and it’s up to James to acquire it, no matter the means.

The Burnt Orange Heresy’s similarities to a Highsmith Ripley story couldn’t be overstated. It’s charged, erotic and there’s a possibly fraudulent but highly charismatic man circling crime in the art world.

And its concerns with truth and facades lends to some speechifying on James’ part, which only further highlights his own arrogance.

The performances are better than the movie Picture: Jose Haro/Sony

The Burnt Orange Heresy does offer many thoughts on art and, more significantly, the possession of it – who does it belong to, the person who created it or the world that consumes it? At one point, it’s as if the film is daring viewers (and reviewers) to not judge it.

But that all gets a bit lost as director Giuseppe Capotondi and screenwriter Scott Smith struggle to bring it home. The movie revs up the jeopardy too much and too quickly, and some of the seeds planted earlier become too obvious rather than clever.

And the moody tone that worked so well in the first two-halves doesn’t carry through.

Bang gives James’ disintegration a threatening edge, but if you really want to see Bang have a meltdown in the world of art, Palme d’Or-winning The Square is a masterpiece.

But it is a beautifully rendered movie. The Lake Como villa and its surrounds are cast in an under-saturated light, which lends the movie a repressive and menacing atmosphere, even among somewhere so beautiful.

And there is something to be said about Bang and Debicki’s forms on screen. They’re both very tall (he 193cm, she 190cm) and when they’re entwined, the angles and sculptural lines created by their bodies are so striking, the tableau could be committed to a canvas – and in a movie about art, that doesn’t go unnoticed.

An ultimately solid if under-boiled thriller.

Rating: 3/5

The Burnt Orange Heresy is in cinemas now

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