If the high-end art trade were a city, it would probably ressemble one of those cities, say a London or a Paris, standing on top of a great honeycomb of sewers and tunnels. And there, in this dank and dangerous underworld, one could find anything and everything : caches of drugs, ancient graves, entrances to secret brothels, shaft ladders overrun with diseased rats.
"The burnt orange heresy" is a thriller exploring this dark side. The scenery may be nice and sun-kissed, but the intrigue is certainly black-hearted enough, what with people willing to commit or condone forgery, arson and murder in order to make a great deal of money.
At the same time the movie is a satire, and a pretty sharp-witted satire too, on the kind of modern art that is wholly dependent not on vision and talent, but on hype and razzle-dazzle. Here, as an old reactionary of the type that falls asleep from boredom in front of glue-covered parakeet cages called "Buttercup Synergy XXIII", I cannot but agree. And yes, I too have entertained unpleasant suspicions on the subject of art critics who can wax lyrical about the unsurpassed significance of a few stripes of yellow paint criss-crossing a white background...
I found "Heresy" entertaining and suspenseful. I also liked the cleverness of some of the ideas, such as the fingerprint immortalized in drying paint. ("Mark of Cain", indeed.) However, I cannot call "Heresy" a complete triumph. For instance, there was Donald Sutherland's performance as Jerome Debney, the ancient and reclusive painter. Sutherland gave his character a sinister, manipulative edge that felt definitely creepy : one would not have been surprised to see the old painter bully or abuse an unsuspecting woman. Instead Debney turned out to be relatively innocuous, at least compared to some of the sharks circling around.
The movie also spins a tale in which nobody finds it suspicious that a man's career should be punctuated by devastating fires. One hopes that in real life at least SOME policemen or insurance investigators would sit up and take notice - there can't exist too many persons whose artistic output gets destroyed through fire three times in a row.
I've never read the source novel "Heresy" is based on, but after watching the movie I've put it on my "to do" list.
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