Imagining an artist's life as little more than a series of portentous set pieces, [director] Ruiz, who also wrote the script, has made a film that is neither portrait nor allegory but empty ornamentalism.
Overview
A portrait of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt whose lavish, sexual paintings came to symbolize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Director and cast
- Raúl Ruiz Director
- John Malkovich as Gustav Klimt
- Saffron Burrows as mia
- Veronica Ferres as Midi
- Stephen Dillane as Secretary
- Sandra Ceccarelli as Serena Lederer
- Aglaia Szyszkowitz as Mizzi
- Joachim Bißmeier as Hugo Moritz
- Ernst Stötzner as Minister Hartl
- Paul Hilton as Duke Octave
- Annemarie Düringer as Klimt's Mother
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
John Malkovich has virtually cornered the market on portraying aesthetes in the thrall of demonic visions. Klimt adds to his gallery of elegant monsters.
A good bio of any historical character has to have a compelling story, whether evil or good. Klimt appears to have had that story. I sure would have liked to know what it was.
Ruiz is terrific in evoking a heady atmosphere of ornate fin de siecle decadence, and Malkovich is ideally cast as a coolly intellectual, free-thinking, free-living aesthete...
Ruiz is so intent on harnessing the painter to his own -- here, rather arid -- relativism that he never manages to convey the unfettered eros that brings crowds flocking to exhibitions of Klimt's work, even as critics hold their noses.
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