Mick Jagger's performance was quite delicious as a menacing art collector, however. He danced the line between being very good and very bad and I decided he was very good. Elizabeth Debicki was commendable in a confused role - I could make no sense of why she would willingly get involved with the art critic in the first place. She had supposedly taken a prolonged leave of absence from her job to have an abortion. Instead of taking a few sick days, she was disappeared to Italy in a cloak of shame like a 1950s teenager and ended up in the arms of the critic.
Early on there was a graphic sex scene that seemed inappropriate for the half-empty cinema of retirees on a Sunday afternoon. I appreciate a good sex scene as much as the next guy but it was gratuitous, adding very little to the story. Plus, Debicki is 29 and Claes Bang - who she was banging - is 53 and, until I see women in their 50s banging men in their 20s without comment on the age differential, I don't want to see scenes like this one either.
Hats off to the locations scout though - there's some spectacular vista-porn as they drive through Italy and the estate where much of the film is set is ideal for something creepy and nefarious to happen. Unfortunately though, spectacular scenery and a stellar cast couldn't get me interested in this film. I would rather have been at the beach.
HE SAW
The movie's first sex scene was so confronting and the rest of the audience so old, I felt like I'd just walked in on my parents. It threw me off my game and I took a while to re-immerse myself in what turned out to be a moody and quite entertaining story driven by a series of character-driven mysteries, such as when is Mick Jagger going to appear and is he going to be any good?
Ultimately, though, the movie got lost up its own sense of worthiness and was not redeemed by its worn-out message that the art world is light on substance and heavy on bulls***. Jagger played a significant role as a wealthy art collector. He wasn't as bad as I'd assumed he'd be.
Basically, there's a bad guy at the movie's centre who will do anything for fame etc, etc. There are lies, murder, extreme wealth and so on. His character was accurately summed-up during one particularly tension-laden scene when a woman in the theatre whispered to her companion and everyone else in the theatre: "He's up to something."
Afterwards, I offered Zanna the thesis that the movie was a classic battle of good and evil. She did not agree with that, not one bit. I could see it in her eyes.
I said, of the male lead, "He's evil."
She said, "Is he?" By which she meant, "He's not."
I said, "He was pure evil; she was pure good."
She said, "That's very binary." By which she meant, "That's very wrong."
I said the female lead represented Jesus and the male lead represented the Devil. I admit this was probably a stretch.
She said, "It's so reductive and boring to say he's just evil." She was probably right but she could have been nicer about it.
She said she didn't really like the movie; she found it boring. She had several reasons for that and one of them was that she had no sympathy for the main guy because he had no redeeming qualities. She said: "There was no reason to think that he had any sort of conscience."
It was as if she was searching for another way to say, "He was evil." I didn't push her on it though. Some things are better left unsaid.
