“You’re not real,” Berenice (Elizabeth Debicki) venomously tells her boyfriend, art critic James Figueras (Claes Bang) in Giuseppe Capotondi’s film The Burnt Orange Heresy. It’s a charge regularly leveled at critics, who are often portrayed as fake, facile parasites—carping wannabes who don’t understand the truth of art. The film dutifully reproduces most of these stereotypes. But it also, almost despite itself, suggests that it’s not critics who are inauthentic, but the labor relationships in which they find themselves.
When purity is profit, you start to wonder if it is in fact purity. Wheeling out the gamely, mugging Sutherland to be an art star character certainly seems like a crassly commercial move; the movie is attempting to capitalize on his reputation just as Cassidy wants to capitalize on Debney’s. There’s the same dynamic with the stunt casting of Mick Jagger, an artist famous for enriching himself by appropriating the work of less successful blues performers. Jagger’s dry, smarmy presence is a reminder that it’s not just critics who can turn other’s labor into their own profit.
Dir. Giuseppe Capotondi, 99 min.
