Last night's movie watch was a somewhat unusual choice for me – a crime thriller, with nary a monster or musical number or even a movie star of the animated kind anywhere in sight, or hearing. Moreover, its setting and storyline were also very intriguing, especially for a flick from this particular movie genre. So I decided to watch it (it was about to be shown on the UK TV channel Film4), and I'm very glad that I did. Even its title was suitably enigmatic – The Burnt Orange Heresy.
WARNING – SPOILER ALERT! Read no further if you don't want to know about this movie's storyline!
Directed by Giuseppe Capotondi, based upon Charles Willeford's eponymous 1971 novel, and released as an Italian/Engish production in 2020 by Sony Pictures Classics, The Burnt Orange Heresy stars Claes Bang as ambitious but under-achieving art critic James Figueras. One day, at the end of a class that he has given to a batch of college students in Milan, Italy, on the role and significance of art critics, James is approached by a young woman named Berenice 'Bernie' Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki) who has been sitting at the back of the class listening intently to his lecture, and the two swiftly find that they are attracted to each other in a meeting of minds and of bodies. In just a few days they become close friends, and when James receives a mysterious invitation to visit renowned and immensely-wealthy art dealer/collector Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger – yes indeed!) at his palatial mansion on Lake Como, he persuades Bernie to come along too.
When they arrive, Cassidy makes James an offer that if he accepts will boost his career immensely, but if he refuses will destroy him. The offer is the unique opportunity to interview the world's most reclusive artist – the truly enigmatic Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland), who was last interviewed 50 years ago, shortly after the second of two major fires at his studio, which had destroyed all of his work.
In latter years, Debney has lived in a remote run-down house with a studio, tucked away in the vast grounds of Cassidy's mansion, away from the world and giving him the privacy to paint more pictures. But that is not all. The combined effects of the two conflagrations and Debney's obsession for secrecy and solitude mean that there is not a single Debney painting owned by any gallery or private individual anywhere in the world – and whatever new work he has created since the fires remains resolutely hidden from public view, and beyond the reach of even the wealthiest patron. Anything or everything is concealed within his fortress-like house, which is locked, bolted, and barred to a degree that would put Fort Knox to shame!
Interviewing Debney inside his house, and viewing at first-hand his hitherto-unseen, unknown, undocumented new works, would be the coup of a lifetime for James, and he knows it – but so too does the wholly unscrupulous, amoral Cassidy, which is why the price he is charging James for access to Debney is so high.
For in return for the interview, James must procure, i.e. steal, one of Debney's paintings and bring it to Cassidy, who will then become the only person or gallery to own a Debney artwork. If he refuses, Cassidy will make public various unsavoury facts about James's professional dealings that would ruin his reputation forever and possibly even send him to prison. So James has no option but to agree. However, he does not tell Bernie anything about this dark side of the deal, only informing her that he has been granted permission to interview Debney, living on Cassidy's estate.
When they meet the elderly Debney, they discover him to be a somewhat fey yet philosophical, paradoxical character, with his head in the clouds but also with his feet planted firmly on the ground, often talking in riddles but piercingly cognizant of whoever he encounters, in turn melancholic and melodramatic. Debney develops a natural rapport with Bernie, who enjoys listening to him talking about his life and work, but far less so with James, whose only concern is commencing the interview as soon as possible and seeing his studio's treasure trove of new, never-before-documented paintings. Finally Debney agrees to show them the contents of his studio as a precursor to the interview – but both Bernie and especially James are astonished to discover that there are no new paintings! All that the studio contains are blank canvases, signed on the back by Debney and annotated with surreal-sounding titles.
Debney reveals to them that in the 50 years since the second fire, he has painted nothing, due to disillusionment with what art can really achieve, as well as a need for stimulation, for novelty. And then he sensationally confesses that his disillusionment and needs had already begun some time before the second fire, and had actually driven him to start the fire – which until now had always been assumed to have been accidental in nature, not deliberate.
Stupefied by Debney's shocking revelations, and only too mindful of what Cassidy may well do if he learns the terrible truth, a now-desperate James covertly hatches an even more desperate plan. He will break into Debney's house and studio while the artist is away in town one evening, steal one of the signed blank canvases, then set fire to everything there to cover his tracks before making his escape. And this is indeed what he does, making off with a canvas that Debney had entitled 'The Burnt Orange Heresy', but keeping everything secret from Bernie, not to mention Cassidy, whose mansion they soon leave while he is away on business.
Back in his apartment in Milan and armed with his art critic knowledge of the abstract/analytic form that Debney's documented art had typically taken before the first two fires had destroyed them, James produces on the blank canvas a blazing sunset-like painting, inspired by the title 'The Burnt Orange Heresy' and in the style of Debney. Before he has chance to hide it, however, and while it is still wet, Bernie arrives on the scene, touches its surface with two fingertips and, guessing his plan to pass it off as a genuine Debney, angrily remonstrates with an increasingly self-deluding James, trying to instill in his panicked mind that this is not a real Debney, that it never can be anything more than what it truly is, a fake.
Clearly, no-one has ever told her that you should always be very cautious how you react with people you have only known for a few days, and of whose own reactions, especially their most extreme ones, in extreme circumstances, you have absolutely no knowledge or experience. Let's just say that Bernie shortly afterwards had a very close, lasting encounter with a very heavy ashtray, then with a deep secluded lake – and not in a good way…
As for James: after informing Cassidy (to the latter's great relief) that he had been able to procure a painting from Debney's studio before it had all burned down in the mysterious fire there, he found himself (courtesy of Cassidy's network of prominent contacts) in a much-elevated position within the art world. And when Debney died shortly afterwards of a heart attack, Cassidy was able to display 'The Burnt Orange Heresy' at a glittering public gathering of the art world's cognoscenti and paparazzi held in his mansion, proclaiming it (as he falsely believed it to be) the only existing Debney artwork in the world. Only James knew what it really was, a fake that he had personally created, and he had no plans whatsoever to go public with that information anywhere!
And then… another art critic at the gathering mentioned how clever it had been of Debney to sign the painting itself (i.e. not just the canvas on the back) in such a distinctive, personalized manner, with two of his own fingerprints, directly embedded in the painting. Almost paralysed with fear,, James realized of course that those were not Debney's but Bernie's, and that if ever Cassidy chose to verify the fingerprints, that is what would be found. But that was not all. Cassidy made a number of ambiguous remarks to him during the gathering that seemed at least to James to suggest that Cassidy knew more about what had really happened, including Bernie's watery wake, than he had any right to know. Cassidy also told James that although Bernie had mysteriously gone missing, a small painting had been sent to her by Debney just before his death, but as Cassidy had been informed that it was not signed, he considered it to be worthless from an art world point of view.
The movie ends with a brief view of this painting, which is in fact a sketched portrait of Bernie, and is now at her mother's house. The camera moves in, closer and closer, and just as the scene begins to fades and go dark, a microscopic signature can be momentarily discerned on the portrait – the signature of Joseph Debney. So there really is a single surviving Debney artwork in the world after all, but it’s not in Cassidy's mansion… (An even more ironic twist appears in Willeford's original novel, in which it transpires that Debney owes his esteemed reputation totally to art critics, never having actually painted anything in his entire career!)
Although taking time to get started, and seeming a little labored at times, it's not too long before the dark spell of The Burnt Orange Heresy begins to take hold, and once you're in its thrall you remain there for the remainder of the movie, with the final half hour or so being particularly engrossing, as it is by no means clear how it will end for any of the main characters.
Speaking of which: I have to state that Jagger is an absolute revelation as creepy Cassidy, portraying him as a masterfully restrained but ice-cold, veritably reptilian monster who would devour his own offspring in a trice if it would benefit him in any way to do so. And Donald Sutherland portrays the mystifying Debney very effectively, though it would have been most interesting to see how the character would have been played by the original choice for this role – none other than Christopher Walken. True, Bang and Debicki perform their respective lead roles well enough, but there is no doubt that supporting actors Jagger and Sutherland effortlessly steal from them every scene that they appear in. (Incidentally, the part of Bernie has been dramatically enlarged for the movie – she was only a minor character in the novel.)
Also worth noting – in fact you can't miss it – is a very specific motif that recurs throughout the movie. Namely, the image, or sometimes even the physical presence, of a fly as a secret symbol of evil. It features heavily in a story told in differing ways by different characters concerning an artist murdered by the Nazis during World War 2; James nearly suffocates when one flutters inside his nose while he is sleeping; a mysterious unposted envelope addressed to James and given to him at the public debut of the fake Debney painting at Cassidy's mansion is found when opened by James to contain several dead flies. And so on.
All very cryptic, clever, and curious – rather like this movie itself, in fact, which I thoroughly recommend to anyone interested in watching a crime thriller with a difference, a big difference.
If you'd like to watch an official trailer for The Burnt Orange Heresy on YouTube, please click here to do so.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
Never heard of this film before but it sounds like something I would enjoy watching. Basically a throwback to the weirder French and Italian crime thrillers of the 1960's and 1970's. Thanks for posting this review and making me aware that the film even existed Karl!
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