Film reviews, The Last Vermeer, Disclosure, Golden Voices

The Aussie actor is a dandyish art dealer in The Last Vermeer, which is based on real events just after the European war.

Han van Meegeren is played with great skill and considerable relish by Guy Pearce sporting permed grey locks and waxed eyebrows

The Last Vermeer (M)
Limited national release
★★★★

For the countries occupied by Germany during World War II the period immediately following the collapse of the Reich and the death of Hitler must have been a profoundly chaotic time – a time of celebration, of course, but also a time for settling old scores and weeding out the collaborators and the quislings. The events depicted in The Last Vermeer, which is based on real events, commence on May 29, 1945, just three weeks after the end of the European war. Although Amsterdam, with its magnificent old houses and canals, is relatively unscathed, the port of Rotterdam is in ruins. Former members of the Dutch resistance have been co-opted into the Allied forces of liberation. Joseph Piller, played by Swedish actor Claes Bang, is temporarily wearing the uniform of a Canadian officer when he is present at the discovery, on a train that had once been bound for Germany, a number of stolen art treasures including a priceless painting by 17th century painter Johannes Vermeer, “Christ and the Adulteress”.

Investigations reveal that the painting had been sold, for an astronomical price, to Hermann Goring by flamboyant art dealer Han van Meegeren, who is played with great skill and considerable relish by Guy Pearce sporting permed grey locks and waxed eyebrows. Once a painter himself, who found no success with Holland’s critical establishment, van Meegeren appears to have reinvented himself as a bon vivant, able – despite wartime privations – to live very comfortably indeed. For the Dutch authorities, certain that the painting must have been stolen, probably from murdered Jews, van Meegeren’s crime deserves the death penalty.

But, after initial misgivings, Piller finds himself – literally – defending the man.

The case was a cause celebre in Holland at the time (photographs of the real van Meegeren appear during the end credits) and it’s undoubtedly an astonishing story. First-time director Dan Friedkin – a former car dealer who turned producer with films like All the Money in the World, The Mule and the Swedish Cannes prizewinner The Square – has made a polished, intriguing, handsome movie. His main asset is his casting. Bang, the tall actor from The Square (who is looking more and more like 1950s British leading man Stewart Granger) is a powerful presence but is overshadowed by Pearce who seems to be having a ball with his mercurial portrayal of the dandyish van Meegeren. The intelligence and humour Pearce brings to the character more than makes up for the fact that the real van Meegeren looked nothing at all like him.

The film is not perfect. It takes too long to get underway, the tentative romance between Piller and his assistant, Minna (Vicky Krieps), is a bit conventional and some of the “bad guys” – an aggressive Dutch cop played by August Diehl among them – are too conventionally drawn. But for all its flaws Friedkin succeeds in capturing the confusing mood of the period, the tensions and recriminations, and the bewildering aftermath of a country just liberated from a brutal occupation.

During production the film was titled Lyrebird, which seems like an interesting comment on its main character, but it’s based on a book, The Man who made Vermeers, by Jonathan Lopez. It will fascinate art lovers as well as 20th century history buffs.

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Disclosure (MA15+)
Limited release
★★★½

Disclosure is a dialogue-driven Australian film basically centred around four characters, two couples who are neighbours in an affluent outlying suburb of Melbourne. Journalist Danny Bowman (Mark Leonard Winter) and his filmmaker wife Emily (Matilda Ridgway) are enjoying a sunny afternoon by their kidney-shaped pool; their four-year-old daughter Natasha has been taken to ballet class by her grandmother and their house is sufficiently secluded from the outside world to enable the couple to enjoy a degree of privacy that allows them to swim naked.

So they’re discomfited by the unexpected and unannounced arrival of neighbours – Joel Chalmers (Tom Wren), a politician, and his wife, Bek (Geraldine Hakewell) – and even more so because Joel is accompanied by an armed bodyguard.

Despite this intrusion, Danny and Emily welcome the newcomers, but the initial small-talk is awkward; something’s obviously wrong and we soon discover what.

Natasha has complained to her parents that the Chalmers’ 10-year-old son had behaved inappropriately towards her, and the Bowmans had passed the complaint on to the boy’s parents. But the Chalmers refuse to believe the little girl’s accusation, and bitter recriminations and arguments follow.

What follows is a tense and consummately acted drama in which the explosive themes are handled with a forthright candour. While the men seek to find some kind of compromise, their wives take far more radical positions, positions that threaten to bring scandal to both families.

Written and directed by Michael Bentham, the film could just as easily have been a stage play given its single setting, real-time structure and reliance on dialogue. But despite its modest trappings, it provides some effective drama as matters move towards a potentially violent climax.

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Golden Voices (Auksiniai balsai) (tbc)
Limited release
★★★★

I used to loathe watching foreign language films that were dubbed into English, but in several countries – Germany, Italy, Russia among them – this practice is still common. The charming Israeli film Golden Voices is about a Russian couple who were employed dubbing foreign movies into Russian in the old USSR but who discover, when they move to Israel in 1990, they have to find new ways to earn money.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, thousands of Russian Jews migrated to Israel where they were warmly welcomed. Among them are the fictional characters of Evgeny Ruman’s film, Victor (Vladimir Friedman) and Raya (Maria Belkin). The couple, in their 60s, have lived all their lives under a totalitarian system, so at first they find things in their new home pretty strange. They are assigned a very pleasant apartment in Tel Aviv, but they have to pay the rent, so they have to find work. And movies in Israel are shown with subtitles, so there’s no demand for their former profession.

Victor was, it seems, quite influential back in the old days. He recalls that, in 1963, the Soviet censors had banned Fellini’s 81/2 but that he had managed to persuade them to allow it to be screened at the Moscow Film Festival, where it won the main award. He even has a photograph of himself beside a grateful Federico as a souvenir of the occasion.

But what to do now? To begin with, Victor is employed by the local council and tasked with handing out leaflets warning of a possible impending invasion by Iraq and what protective steps should be taken. Later he stumbles across a small company that sells and rents VHS tapes of foreign films dubbed into Russian; this is strictly illegal, but at least it’s something. Victor and his new boss acquire their product by taking a camera into the cinema and photographing the movie from a seat in the stalls (hoping their view won’t be interrupted by an audience member). Raya, meanwhile, has taken on a different kind of job: she is hired by a sex company to talk dirty to clients on the telephone and through this she encounters the shy, stuttering Gera (Alexander Senderovich).

The film is very successful in depicting the challenges facing this couple as, at a relatively late stage in their lives, they find themselves living and working in a society so different from what they’ve been used to. Built around the excellent performances of the two leading actors, the director, whose parents were Russian emigrants to Israel, based the film around personal observations and the challenges faced by the newcomers, of which the requirement to learn Hebrew is only a start.

Golden Voices is an original, unusual and quite disarming film about the immigrant experience.