The search for the Woman in Gold

Woman in Gold (dir. Simon Curtis, cert. 12A) tells the true story of a painting by Gustav Klimt stolen from its Jewish owners after the Anschluss in Austria. It is (its original title) a Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer; Adele was a wealthy socialite and patron of the arts in early 20th century Vienna.

A second portrait of Adele, and three other Klimt paintings, became the subject of a law case in the US Supreme Court, and finally binding arbitration in Austria, where the portrait (using copious amounts of gold leaf) had taken on the status of “The Mona Lisa of Austria”. The film begins with Klimt (Moritz Bleibtreu) applying gold as his sitter Adele (Antje Traue) looks faintly bored.

Despite criticism that the film is faintly boring, it is steady and matter-of-fact storytelling enlivened by Helen Mirren’s turn as Adele’s niece Maria Altmann, now living in Los Angeles, as she steps outside the safety of her adopted country. She turns to family friend lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to help her recover the works she believes to be her inheritance, and travels with him to face her ghosts in Vienna.

Alexi Kaye Campbell’s script mixes modern courtroom drama with sepia-tinted scenes of Vienna under the Nazis (in German with English subtitles), and looking at the mixed motives of Altmann and Schoenberg – the one picture was valued at over $100m. It’s also a voyage of discovery for Schoenberg, a grandson of the famous composer, as visiting Vienna’s Holocaust Memorial (by English sculptor Rachel Whiteread) brings home to him that looted art is but a part of the story.

An early decision of the Austrian art restitution committee – that “Adele” will stay in Austria – is made alongside a “Past - Present- Future” slogan. The committee’s work derived from the investigations of Journalist Hubertus Czernin (Daniel Brühl).

Czernin was instrumental in establishing the “looted” provenance of the pictures. His motivation is expiation for the sins of his Nazi father, and he helped expose Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past (mentioned in the film) and the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna’s sexual abuse (not mentioned).

Not mentioned too is Adele’s modelling for Klimt’s two semi-nude pictures of Jewish apocryphal heroine Judith. Adele died from meningitis in 1925 aged 43, and it was her note that she hoped her husband would, after his death, leave the paintings to the Austrian State Gallery that was the basis for the Austrian government’s claim to ownership.

There’s some humour in Mirren’s portrayal of Altmann, who died in 2011 aged 94, but it’s the hurt, and the cry of “memories and justice”, that underlie the film. Adele’s necklace ends up round Goering’s wife’s throat, Maria’s father’s Stradivarius cello is taken, but Maria (Tatiana Maslany in the 30s) and husband Fritz (Max Irons) try to flee the Reich in the one nod to excitement, a chase.

There are shades of the end of Casablanca in the airport scene as they wait to board a flight, and a shameless borrowing from the end of Titanic as aged Maria mingles with her 1930s family in her old home. The movie ends with the estimate of over 100,000 works of art looted by the Nazis still to be repatriated and restored to rightful owners, and, following this and The Monuments Men, there may be more stories to be

filmed.