The Burnt Orange Heresy (2020) Review

 rating: ****

the story: A con artist art critic stumbles on the opportunity of a lifetime.

review: Sometimes titles alone are a hook, which for me anyway if you’re going to call your movie The Burnt Orange Heresy it’s practically irresistible. The other big draw is Elizabeth Debicki, who has also been a standout in Widows and Tenet. Technically she isn’t the lead actor here. Danish actor Claes Bang is (he comes off like a bootleg Cary Grant, where the movie itself feels like authentic classic Hollywood), playing the con artist art critic.

Here’s another movie worth talking about based off how terrible its reviews have been. It’s astonishing how terrible these things can be, so utterly obviously dismissive, because critics know audiences aren’t really going to care one way or another (especially thanks to aggregate websites that arbitrarily grant grades to movies based on the results, which somehow only emphasize how poorly critics do their jobs).

Anyway, this is to say that you don’t have to worry what critics have said about it. Their opinions are worthless.

The results are interesting for the very reason that Claes Bang is himself so hard to care about. You don’t need to care about him. So much of popular entertainment in recent decades has been obsessed with trying to make bad people look compelling, it’s refreshing to let the lead character in one of them suavely unsympathetic, emphasized by the actor himself having the lowest profile of the main cast. You get to see him for what he is, a conman willing to do anything to get what he wants, in an environment that’s considered high brow, and as a result diminishing attacks on the results as part of its message. Mick Jagger is an easy target as the smarmy collector who both facilitates the results and condemns them, Donald Sutherland the reclusive artist who ends up kind of welcoming his doom. 

The only victim here is Debicki, or at least her character, who actually becomes a martyr in her effort to expose the conman, who believes until the clever twist ending that he got away with it. But he absolutely doesn’t. The art world celebrates him, but he doesn’t get away with it, murdering Debicki, Sutherland. History will eventually expose him. 

Anyway, it’s a movie that’s sultry in all the right ways, losing itself in the glamour of the con, the patent romance of filmmaking, of art, and using it against itself.

So yeah, it’s a modern version of classic Hollywood. With a great title.