Jagger the WOODEN STONE plays his part for art
The Burnt Orange Heresy (15, cinemas)
Verdict: Complex but satisfying ★★★II Mogul Mowgli (15, cinemas) Verdict: Electrifying ★★★★I
ACOMPLEX thriller set in the world of fine art, The Burnt Orange Heresy is no masterpiece but well worth looking at, not least for the exquisitely agonising spectacle of Mick Jagger acting his heart out, if not his lips off.
I will always bow down to Jagger the rock god, but as an actor he gives precious little satisfaction. Playing a filthy rich, decidedly oily art collector called Joseph Cassidy, he recites his l i nes irreproachably, even throwing in a sly inflection here and an elongated vowel there, but it is one of those performances you watch with a knot of anxiety in case it gets any more wooden.
Jagger has a list of feature-film acting credits going back half a century to the likes of Performance and Ned Kelly. But that doesn’t make him any good. Here, unhelpfully for him but mercifully for the rest of us, he is shown up as an amateur by the expertise around him. If you were to invert the scenario ... well, my wife suggested it would be like Freddie ‘Parrot Face’ Davies fronting The Rolling Stones, but that seems a tad harsh.
By contrast, Danish actor Claes Bang is perfectly cast as urbane art critic James Figueras, who appears to have conspired in a Giacometti fraud; ditto Elizabeth Debicki as his American lover, Berenice Hollis, and not only because she has a long, thin, Giacometti body (none of which is left to the imagination in a raunchy early sex scene).
That old master Donald Sutherland gets to flex his acting muscles, too, which is always a treat. He plays a reclusive artist called Jerome Debney, who l i ves on Cassidy’s palatial Lake Como estate.
FOLLOwING an arresting opening, in which James dazzles a bunch of American tourists by eloquently explaining how easily they can be manipulated into thinking a bad painting is good, he and Berenice, his new girlfriend, visit Cassidy on Lake Como.
The smarmy rascal wants James to steal for him what even extreme wealth cannot buy — a rare, original Debney. Hence the film’s curious title. It is the name Debney has given to a canvas, intending to befuddle critics into wondering what its meaning is, when in fact there is no meaning. Giuseppe Capotondi’s f i l m, adapted from Charles willeford’s 1971 novel of the same name, is full of such slick, clever digs at the fine art establishment.
At times, however, Scott Smith’s screenplay is too slickly clever for its own good. The dialogue snaps and fizzes but in a kind of headache-inducing way, as we struggle to keep up with everyone’s erudite wit. There is also a clunky, recurring fly metaphor to which I yearned to take a plastic swatter.
All that said, Debicki and Bang are both splendid, the former whetting the appetite for her Princess Diana in the final two seasons of Netflix’s The Crown, while the l atter compounds his stature as one of the most compelling actors in the recent
Scandinavian invasion of Englishlanguage cinema and television.
Moreover, his near-immaculate English accent in this film, with just the tiniest hint that he might not be the debonair Mayfair gent he affects to be, exactly reflects his character. As James begins to reveal his true colours, The Burnt Orange Heresy takes on the feel of a Patricia Highsmith adaptation such as The Talented Mr Ripley or The Two Faces Of January, beguiling us with its twisted plot and sumptuous settings.
THERE i s nothing at all sumptuous about Mogul Mowgli, the story of an Anglo-Pakistani rap star superbly played by Riz Ahmed, who also co-wrote the film and uses his own talent as a rapper with the Swet Shop Boys to give it real credibility and emotional purchase.
He plays Zed, whose New York career is on the verge of lift- off when his American girlfriend shames him i nto visiting his orthodox Muslim family in west London. For someone who is always rapping about where he comes from, she points out, he doesn’t go home much.
So back he goes, before a major European tour, but i s soon diagnosed with a life-threatening auto-immune condition which makes him re-evaluate his origins, identity and lifestyle.
There are some slightly challenging fantasy sequences but on the whole this i s a really admirable independently made British film, powerful, moving and at times very funny, nicely directed by Bassam Tariq and f ully electrified by Ahmed’s livewire performance.