The Best Offer (La migliore offerta)

Geoffrey Rush, Sylvia Hoeks, Jim Sturgess, Donald Sutherland

Very enjoyable and clever movie set in the world of art dealing.

Rush plays Virgil Oldman, a highly-regarded art expert and auctioneer, who is contacted by a mysterious young woman called Claire who wants her family’s art collection appraised and sold. She lives in a decrepit old Italian villa and appears to be extremely reclusive. At first she keeps failing to turn up for promised meetings with Rush. He begins to appraise her collection in her absence, then she finally speaks to him from a hidden location in the house. Angry and frustrated but intrigued, he continues with the project, to find that she retreats to a hidden room whenever anyone visits, blaming her severe agoraphobia on childhood trauma.

Eventually, Oldman manages to catch a secret glimpse of Claire. She is young and beautiful, in her twenties and (naturally) he falls for her. Gradually, he manages to tease her out from hiding and develop an unlikely relationship with her. How unlikely and where it goes from there I can’t reveal without spoiling the movie for you. But it’s cleverly constructed and very engaging.

There’s a nice role for Donald Sutherland (who I haven’t seen in a movie for a long time) as a neglected artist who is an old friend and conspirator of Oldman in some shady deals.

The movie is an Italian production, filmed mostly in Italy and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (director of Cinema Paradiso), with a score by Ennio Morricone (whose soundtracks for Sergio Leone’s ‘spaghetti westerns’ remain classics), still composing at 85 years old. The score for The Best Offer won the 2013 European Film Award.

I liked it a lot.

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