A biopic of Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), what instantaneously catches our eyes is the pulchritude ofits leading actor Noah Saavedra, whose Adonis appearance becomes almost too distracting for the movie’s own good, but it shouldn’t take the credit away from Saavedra’s immersed embodiment of the ill-reputed expressionist, who leaves a vast legacy to this world after his own ephemeral and turbulent life.
After opening the picture with a frenzied sequence of some sort of familial turmoil and envisaging a moribund Schiele smitten with the Spanish flu pandemic in his last days, directorDieter Berner discerningly unspools Schiele’s final decade chronologically through the relations with his models: from his underage sister Gerti (Riegner), with whom he forms an intimate bond teetering on the brink of incest, to a tableau-vivant performer Moa (Breidbach), then his bona-fide muse Wally Neuzil (Pachner), whom he first encounters in the studio of his mentor Klimt (Obonya), until his ill-matched bourgeois wife Edith Harms (Marie Jung), only to coyly divulge Schiele’s feckless penchant towards his conquests, chiefly for the sake of artistic inspiration and utilitarian purpose, art first, women second, seems a fitting watchword for him.
It is Egon and Wally’s romantic liaison highlights the narrative, and a sylph-likeValerie Pachner gives her best in projecting Wally’s emotional gamutout oftheir artist-and-muse equilibrium, in particular during Schiele’s scandalous trial of pornography and pedophilia (another taboo topic subjected to an ambiguous brush), her conflicted reaction stays with audience longer than the artist’s outrage of witnessing one of his paintings being torched. But Berner ultimatelysweetens the pill of their fallout, which prompts the name-change of the film's titular painting,out of the reverence to Egon’s posthumous fame.
As picturesque as a painter’s biopic could ever be, Berner’s diligent butanodynework doesn't pack a substantial punch which would be in concordance with his subject’s singularities, especially that unique characteristic stemming from his licentious, tempestuous persona, still eludes us after him shuffling off this mortal coil.
referential points: Mike Leigh’s MR. TURNER (2014, 8.1/10); Julie Taymor’s FRIDA (2002, 6.8/10).
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