Egon Schiele masterpiece is at the heart of new documentary
PORTRAIT OF WALLY (Andrew Shea, 2012)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Friday, May 11
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
portraitofwally.com
An exciting, fast-paced documentary set in the high-stakes art world, Andrew Shea’s Portrait of Wally is a gripping real-life legal thriller, complete with international intrigue, love and death, class warfare, lies and deception, and Nazis. In 1912, Austrian artist Egon Schiele painted a small portrait of his mistress, Walburga (“Wally”) Neuzil, in addition to a companion self-portrait. In 1939, the painting of Wally was stolen from art dealer Lea Bondi’s personal collection by Friedrich Welz, a Nazi who had also taken over Bondi’s gallery because she was Jewish. When the painting suddenly showed up in New York City in 1997 as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection” exhibition, a furious, angry thirteen-year battle ensued over ownership of the work, involving Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau; MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry; Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the Asset Forfeiture Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office; investigator Willi Korte of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project; Schiele-obsessed art collector Rudolf Leopold; and the Bondi family. Other major museums sided with MoMA in a concerted effort to prevent the government from returning the painting to the Bondis, claiming that it would seriously damage the ability of art institutions to bring works on loan for exhibition in the United States; interestingly, Lowry and MoMA chairman Ronald S. Lauder, who is also the head of the Commission for Art Recovery and displays many of Schiele’s paintings and drawings at his Neue Galerie in New York City, opted not to speak with Shea, but the filmmaker did meet with Morgenthau, Levin, André Bondi, New York Times reporter Judith Dobrzynski, 60 Minutes journalist Morley Safer, Galerie St. Etienne owner and Schiele expert Jane Kallir, and others who share fascinating details about the personal and professional history of Schiele and the painting as well as the inner workings of the art world. Mixing archival footage with new interviews, Shea and his wife, editor Melissa Shea, tell a compelling tale of global importance filled with powerful emotion that, in many ways, evokes the feeling one gets when looking closely at a master work of art. But Portrait of Wally is about a lot more than just art; it is also about memory, about family, about responsibility, and about justice.
After returning to his childhood vacation town of Mouthe, the coldest village in France, only to be told that his recently deceased uncle left him a stuffed dog instead of his eight-hectare vineyard, crime novelist David Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve), who is suffering from writer’s block, suddenly comes upon an idea for his next book. He decides to investigate the surprise suicide of Mouthe’s beloved favorite daughter, Candice Lecouer (Sophie Quinton), a beautiful young blonde who was the face of the town’s leading export, Belle de Jura cheese. Against the firm advice of Brigadier Bruno Leloup (Guillaume Gouix) and Commandant Colbert (Olivier Rabourdin) of the local police, Rousseau snoops into Candice’s past, which he quickly discovers is eerily reminiscent of the life and death of her hero, Norma Jean Baker / Marilyn Monroe. As he gets closer to the truth, however, he finds that playing detective is a lot more dangerous than he imagined. Writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu (April in Love) has fashioned a thrilling modern noir with Nobody Else But You, a gorgeously shot tale of lust, pride, ambition, self-doubt, and obsession, with more than a hint of the surreal and liberal splashes of wry humor. Hustache-Mathieu brings the dead Candice back to life through flashbacks as well as voice-overs not only of her reading from her diaries but narrating from beyond the grave. The film sparkles whenever Quinton is onscreen, the actress casting an enchanting glow that rivals the almost blindingly white snowy landscapes of Mouthe, with expert cinematography courtesy of Pierre Cottereau that evokes the Coen brothers’ Fargo. The fourth collaboration between the radiant Quinton and Hustache-Mathieu, Nobody Else But You, which also boasts an eclectic soundtrack and compelling original score by Stéphane Lopez — and whose English and French (Poupoupidou) titles are both taken from the lyrics of Monroe’s famous song “I Wanna Be Loved by You” — is a rousing good mystery with an engaging balance of the lurid and the erotic.
Photographer Edward Burtynsky has been traveling the world with his large-format viewfinder camera, taking remarkable photographs of environmental landscapes undergoing industrial change. For Manufactured Landscapes, cinematographer Peter Mettler and director Jennifer Baichwal joined Burtynsky on his journey as he documented ships being broken down in Chittagong, Bangladesh; the controversial development of the Three Gorges Dam Project in China, which displaced more than a million people; the uniformity at a factory in Cankun that makes irons and the Deda Chicken Processing Plant in Dehui City; as well as various mines and quarries. Burtynsky’s photos, which were on view at the Brooklyn Museum in late 2005 and often can be seen in Chelsea galleries, are filled with gorgeous colors and a horrible sadness at the lack of humanity they portray. As in the exhibit, the audience is not hit over the head with facts and figures and environmental rhetoric; instead, the pictures pretty much speak for themselves, although Burtynsky does give some limited narration. Baichwal lets the camera linger on its subject, as in the remarkable opening shot, a long, slow pan across a seemingly endless factory. She is also able to get inside the photographs, making them appear to be three-dimensional as she slowly pulls away. Manufactured Landscapes is screening May 11 at the Maysles Cinema as part of the Beyond the Image series, which examines how photography is used in documentary film, and will be followed by a Skype Q&A with Baichwal, moderated by photographer Katie Murray. Curated by Clara Bastid, Maira Nolasco, and Zack Taylor, the series continues May 12 with Cheryl Dunn’s Everybody Street and Albert Maysles and Bradley Kaplan’s Close Up: Photographers at Work, followed by a reception and panel discussion with Maysles, Dunn, and photographers Ricky Powell and Clayton Patterson, moderated by Taylor, and May 13 with Christian Frei’s War Photographer, followed by a Q&A with Nolasco and journalist Jimmie Briggs.
