Film

NOTE: This is a review of a shorter, 97-minute version of the film, which played at the Siskel in June 2007.

In this hypnotic but tiring look at the life of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (Malkovich), Ruiz rejects the conventions of the biopic in favor of a whirling, deliberately artificial fantasia. The camera glides around the actors as though engaged in a waltz, while they deliver stilted dialogue in stylized cadences. The sets are lit with antirealistic flourishes; pools of colored light highlight certain objects. Several characters are figments of Klimt’s imagination (or are they?), and the chronology goes beyond jumbled into atomized. This is not, in short, your parents’ biopic.

Ruiz clearly intends his style to provide a cinematic correlative to Klimt’s paintings, which often feature strange artificial poses and backgrounds that look like gold-encrusted collages. Klimt’s art has become as mainstream as Monet’s, but in Europe circa 1900 he was alternately adored and reviled for his decadent erotic portraits. Ruiz captures some of that reception, while showing very few of Klimt’s actual paintings. Instead, he focuses on the whispering, muttering, gossiping art world of Vienna and Paris, and Klimt’s confused pursuit of a woman who may simply be a lure set by a mysterious voyeur.

Since Klimt suffered from syphilis, it isn’t that implausible to suggest that in the last years of his life he might experience the world as a confused blur full of imaginary people and fragments of memory. At a purely intellectual level, Ruiz is working on an interesting idea here, but it doesn’t always make for compelling cinema. Klimt’s canvases often seemed to be made of fragments, but he always preserved an underlying unity. Ruiz does not achieve the same success.