‘Burnt Orange’ a deliciously nasty shade of noir
A nasty, stylish bit of film noir, “The Burnt Orange Heresy” has a killer cast as well as a killer plot. Brilliant, disgraced, art critic James Figueras (Claes Bang of “The Square”) meets a sexy, blond American named Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki) at a Milan lecture. The two beautiful people land in the sack. He then takes her to the Lake Como villa of mysterious art collector Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger, channeling Klaus Kinski and the devil) and is hired by him to steal a painting from reclusive artist Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland), who lives in Cassidy’s guest house. Fans of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley will love this deliciously degenerate tale of lust, greed, forgery and murder
based on the 1971 novel by the legendary Charles Willeford (“Miami Blues”).
At the lecture, James tells the story of a World War IIera artist who is sent by the Nazis to Buchenwald, where he keeps himself and his sister alive by painting portraits of the Nazi officers. But he adds a tiny fly image to each painting, a metaphor for sin and evil. For this, his masters send him to the gas chamber. You can be sure flies will figure prominently in the rest of this dark fable.
It’s hard to say who comes off more like a vampire, Bang or Jagger. I’d have to say Bang since he’s been drinking gallons of blood playing Dracula on cable these days. In “The Burnt Orange Heresy,” characters tell one another stories, a lost art in this age of texts and Twitter. Yes, there is something delightfully retrograde and Hitchcockian, about the film, including James’ habit of smoking indoors (gasp). Well, this is Europe after all. It seems the reason the brilliant James isn’t running a museum is that he was once caught in a little embezzling.
He says he was going to repay the money.
Berenice has stories, too, about growing up in a small town in Minnesota. Debicki, who was born in Paris of a Polish father and Australian mother, speaks in a Midwestern accent one might think sounds fake. But that might also be the point.
Bang appears to be stuck in very good films about art, including “The Last Vermeer.” Italian director Giuseppe Capotondi of the Netflix series “Suburra: Blood on Rome” keeps the evil bubbling just beneath the surface until he is ready to show it to us in all its dark, drowning depths. Yes, there is even a marvelously Poelike kicker at the end.