secondtake Klimt (2006)John Malkovich is talented but so quirky and full of himself he nearly ruins many of his movies. Surely he sees how affected he can sometimes be? Here he plays the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in the years before WWI, and though we don't quite know what Klimt was like, we know he didn't play his life being John Malkovich. Biopics always struggle with the character against the actor, of course, since history is what it is, and so you swallow all this and see what the actor and the director can do within these constraints.The director in this case is the late Raul Ruiz, the Chilean director who just died in Paris with a small cult following and a growing reputation. He concentrates not on Klimt's art, or even Klimt's attitudes as an artist of his time (this is the time of early Picasso, late Cezanne, and the growing influence of Gauguin). Instead it deals with Klimt's personality, which we know the least about, emphasizing his vulgarity, his obsession with nude women around him as much as possible, and his countless children for whom he apparently did as little as possible.What might have been more interesting is to see a young Klimt being transformed by a 6th century Italian fresco with all its gold leafwork (this is true), or to maybe see him interact with the Vienna Secessionists in their effort, as a group, to break from the academy. What we get instead is a fantasy about the women around him, including a bizarre and willing entrapment of Klimt by a wealthy woman and her double (or twin?) which turns into a kind of erotic sex game with a man watching behind 2-way glass. Then there is a mysterious fellow who seems to only exist in Klimt's head--he's fascinating, yet only half realized. If Ruiz had taken all this into something purely fantastic, where the trappings of history were shed, it might have been a transporting and special movie, an actual cinematic experience on its own terms. At times it tries, and there are some distortions and some beautiful moments, a bit out of place in the narrative, that stand on their own.But mostly this lurches and jerks from situation to situation. The art is great, what we see of it, and the sets are nice, though even they are filmed too often with a yellowed dullness that defies the outrageous decorative beauty of the time. (I just happened to see "The Wings of the Dove" set in the same period and the set and costume design blows "Klimt" away). All of this is too bad especially for an art movie about an artist who believed in total aesthetic immersion--where everything, including your toilet paper holder, had to be an artistic component of a life of art. It's not a disaster, but it's certainly a feminist's nightmare--where Klimt might have defended his painting of women as being honest and where the sex might have been free expression and liberation, the movie pushes all this into pure voyeurism and submissiveness. Women dangle and prance and decorate the movie sets, and your screen, the way Klimt, who was no feminist, might have approved, but which isn't accurate. It isn't about an equality in free loving sex, it's about women from a man's point of view. Period. Some of you will like that, but I did not.

gradyharp KLIMT:A Viennese Fantasy à la manière de Schnitzler is a controversial film, a montage of the elements of the art world and the sociopsychological tenor of the times of the infamous fin de siècle in Europe, a period greatly influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, thee novels and 'performances' of Arthur Schnitzler that focused on the emergence of the new views of sexuality. Being about the rise of sensualism in art and the subsequent Jugenstil (Art Nouveau) and Vienna Secessionist movement, writer director Raúl Ruiz (with aid from Herbert Vesely and Gilbert Adair) has painted a larger than life canvas of this fascinating period in art and in history in general and happens to populate it with significant character from the period. No, the film is not based on hard facts and yes, there are inconsistencies throughout. But that is of less importance than the allure of the period that very successfully comes through this film using the magic of light and the fluidity of the camera. Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918) was a strange artist, a man who believed in a sensualist artificial religion and an artist who favored erotic imagery in his canvases. He was controversial in his time, yet today his paintings using gold leaf and silver leaf and design patterns of expression that defined Art Nouveau sell for many millions of dollars: his style is still imitated and he is still celebrated as the father of erotic art. The film opens and closes with Klimt (John Malkovich) submerged in healing waters in a rather stark hospital, attended by a nurse and his disciple, the equally sensational Egon Schiele (Nicolai Kinski, keeping his hands in the spread-finger style Schiele painted so often!). From this point bits and pieces of Klimt's bizarre life are explored, at times explained through imaginary conversations with his secretary (Stephen Dillane). His marriage, his 'affair' - or is it simply a manifestation of the influence of a muse? - with Lea de Castro (Saffron Burrows), his self indulgence in all things erotic (he is said to have has many affairs with Viennese women yielding a large number of children who bear his genetic puzzle), and his conflict with the Academy of Art, a sense of disgust with the current oeuvre of painting as sterile, and his prodigious output of paintings and drawing of the female nude - all are depicted with tremendous imagination here. The cinematography is as strange as the story it captures, using falling snowflakes in one scene to suggest the falling pieces of Klimt's gold leaf enhancement of his most famous works in others. The dialogue is at times raw and at other times superficial and the audience is begged to indulge in the fantasy that is being recreated. But the film stands well as an example of an art history period and John Malkovich makes a credible Klimt. This is more a film for art students and art lovers who are eager to explore the beginnings of Art Nouveau than a film for audiences eager for accurate biography. Grady Harp

funkyfry Sometimes I think that the most outlandishly "artistic" directors like Raoul Ruiz are the luckiest of all. True, their films are often slammed by the mainstream critics and rarely make a lot of money, but no matter what they do they will be praised in certain quarters -- so long as they remain obtuse and vague at the same time.I knew nothing about this artist Klimt going in to the film, and I know nothing going out of it. Even fact checking here on IMDb I find that much of the information they did present was invented, so basically the film has no informational value about the artist. This isn't a huge problem in and of itself for me because I don't watch a movie to find out facts. But without the facts, it's impossible for anybody in the audience to know what the heck the movie is supposed to be saying.The film it reminded me of was Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut", and I'm curious that one of the titles listed here on IMDb includes mention of Schnitzler. Apparently that's to clue us in to the idea that it's a dream, but Ruiz is no Kubrick and "Eyes Wide Shut" was decidedly tepid Kubrick anyway. The dream device could be a way to use film in an impressionistic way, but in this film there's nothing to get an impression of because the film is totally unhinged. There are tons of just awful sequences that are supposed to be shocking, like when Klimt's mother and sister start raving, but they look completely ridiculous.The worst thing about the movie is the script, which is full of ridiculously obtuse dialog about allegory and portraiture, doubles, etc. I think the audience is just supposed to sit there and think, "ok, there are some complex ideas here, so this must be a good movie." But as bad as the script is, the director could have saved it if he wasn't just spending the whole movie trying to imitate Kubrick, Lynch, and Greenaway. And one man who appears in every single scene in the film, the star Malkovich, could certainly have done something to save it but reveals his poor instincts instead. Malkovich does absolutely nothing except mumble and shuffle around in the movie, playing the character as so detached from life that his sexual exploits seem contrived even though they're the focus of the film far more than his artistic impulses. Even if you had a great script, Malkovich would have sunk the film with his monotone performance. As for the actresses who play his lovers, the less said definitely the better.It's one of those movies that 2% of the people who see it will run around for the rest of their lives saying that they were the only ones smart enough to "get" it. But everybody got it. It was a crap movie with awful performances and no real purpose. Like the artist's "double" in the movie, the film is a fake -- it holds forth promises to tell us about art but in the end it comes off as cheap exploitation, a modern pass-de-Metzger. Eminently miss-able.

pablo-salvador Klimt "offers" a complex cinematic vision. It is not the case of an avant-guard film, but rather the result of a very risky cinematic exercise. Some people claim that this film is impossible to understand and therefore impossible to watch. But I wonder WHO could understand Klimt, the painter and the film. To understand is a very easy conception. "Klimt" is a demanding film. A journey to the unknown, or to the mind of the painter. This is not a film about his paintings as such. But there are also great many things to learn about them, if one is observant. The DVD release provides the so called "Director's Cut", which proves to be a much more comprehensive version than the one released on cinemas, which was chopped-up by the producers. Great cinematography by Argentine D.P. Ricardo Aronovich and a fantastic "wieneese" score by Chilean composer Jorge Arriagada.