Shorn of its particulars, The Art Dealer (L’Antiquaire) is a mystery driven by obsession. The mood is set by the recurring musical motif reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Like many French cineastes, the film’s director, François Margolin, has a strand of Hitchcock in his DNA. In The Art Dealer, that genetic inheritance is largely manifested less by suspense (though there is some of that) than by the uncovering of secrets hidden behind respectable façades.
The film’s protagonist, Esther (Anna Sigalevitch), is a news reporter in Paris who falls into an investigation of something close to home—her family’s past—after a valuable 19th-century painting is acquired for sale by her husband, an art dealer. When her father sees the painting of a pair of leopards, he cries. The canvas had hung in his childhood home, the one he was forced from at age 3 when his father was shot during the Nazi occupation.
The Art Dealer dramatizes a situation handled less imaginatively in another recent film, the fact-based Woman in Gold, as it looks into the wholesale theft of art from Jewish families by the Nazis during World War II. More intriguing than Woman in Gold for being a mystery, The Art Dealer ponders the age-old question of whether the past should be confronted or forgotten in the name of “getting on with it.” Esther has no doubt on this score: She seeks justice for crimes committed against her family and from within her family. The path into the past becomes dangerously slippery. She fears being followed, people disappear and her husband begins to doubt her emotional stability.
The Art Dealer will be screened at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 19 at the Marcus North Shore Cinema (11700 N. Port Washington Road, Mequon) as part of the Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival. For more information on the festival, running Oct. 18-22, visit jccmilwaukee.org/filmfestival.
The Art Dealer
3 and a half stars
Directed by François Margolin
Anna Sigalevitch
Not Rated
