The Best Offer
Short description
Virgil Oldman is a respected art expert and auctioneer who leads a solitary, orderly life built around objects rather than people. His distance from others is deliberate, and his closest attachments are to the paintings he has quietly gathered over the years with help from his friend Billy. When a young woman named Claire asks him to appraise and sell the antiques and artworks from her family's estate, she refuses to meet him in person and communicates only by telephone. Her persistent absence draws Virgil in, and he becomes increasingly determined to learn who she is. At the same time, he keeps coming across fragments of an old mechanical device on her property, and he and a friend named Robert try to work out what the finished mechanism was meant to do.
The film is a crime drama with romantic elements, written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. It followed Baaria in his filmography and was released in 2013, running 131 minutes. Geoffrey Rush plays Virgil, with Sylvia Hoeks as Claire, Jim Sturgess as Robert and Donald Sutherland as Billy. Tornatore had earlier made Cinema Paradiso, A Pure Formality, The Legend of 1900, Malena and The Unknown Woman.
Produced in Italy on a budget of about 14 million dollars, the film took roughly 19 million dollars worldwide. On TMDB it holds 7.8/10 from over three thousand votes, while on IMDb it stands at 5.1/10 from a much smaller sample. A critics' rating of 5.8/10 from 34 reviews places professional reception below the larger audience score on TMDB.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film features several works of art. The painting being restored is "Portrait of a Young Girl" (c. 1470) by Petrus Christus. Among the works Oldman studies are "The Birth of Venus" (1879) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Among the female portraits in his collection are "Portrait of a Young Woman (La Fornarina)" (c. 1519) and "Portrait of a Young Woman (La Muta)" (1507) by Raphael, "La Bella" (The Beautiful Woman) (1536) by Titian, "Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo" (1560) and "Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi" (1541) by Agnolo Bronzino, "Portrait of Caterina Sforza" (c. 1490) by Lorenzo di Credi, "The Gypsy" by Boccaccio Boccaccino, "Portrait of a Girl with a Book of Petrarch's Poems" (c. 1528) by Andrea del Sarto, "Portrait of Bianca Capello" (c. 1572) by Alessandro Allori, "Portrait of Elisabeth Touher" (1499) by Albrecht Dürer, and "Jeanne Samary in Décolleté (La Reverie)" (1877) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. There are also works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco Goya, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Amedeo Modigliani, Morgan Weistling, and many others.
- Sylvia Hoeks, relatively unknown outside of the Netherlands, was noticed by the filmmakers at the Berlin Film Festival.
- Tornatore filmed an alternative ending to the movie. The setting is a restaurant in Rome. The same location is used in preceding scenes, but the final scene, filmed on the same set in Rome, was cut and replaced with a more complex scene, and the dialogue was also slightly altered, filmed in various locations around the world.
- The location of the fictional Czech restaurant Night and Day, which is shown at the end of the film, was actually the restaurant Pivnice u Milosrdnych (closed on 08/03/2013). The restaurant name sign can be seen when Oldman enters (the letters shine through from the exterior sign and are therefore mirrored). The clock on the right side of the entrance was actually the Gambrinus beer logo. The logo of the fictional restaurant above the entrance is also depicted over the Gambrinus logo. At the same time, the beer logo was not masked on the windows.
- Filming took place in several cities in Italy, as well as in Vienna and Prague.
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