A moral human comedy restores what’s been stolen from us.
Set in the world of art-auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the Pascal Bonitzer film Auction presents that rarefied environment without the expected high-class, high-pressure, cutthroat cunning; it uses deceptive quiet instead. Even the penultimate bidding scene, where offers for a long-lost Egon Schiele painting rise to the level of 20 million euros, plays without tension but with smooth observation. This makes Auction itself a rarefied entertainment in the era of polarization and hostility.
Bonitzer started as a screenwriter for André Téchiné and Jacques Rivette during the 1970s, and he carries their humane curiosity and formal aesthetics into his own directing style — the widescreen perception of idiosyncrasies. He works with artistic purpose that’s evident when André Masson (Alex Lutz), the commissaire-priseur (auctioneer) for Scottie’s (fictional) auction house in Paris, endures an art patron’s rudeness. Their meeting, as owner and dealer haggle over terms, reveals the ugly, impolite, literal blindness that exists among the cultured class. But afterward, when Masson assesses the exchange with his new intern Aurore (Louise Chevillotte), a second awkwardness occurs as boss and employee match each other’s cynicism.
This is Auction’s first Téchiné moment, as in the perfect script Bonitzer co-wrote for My Favorite Season, in which family tension mounts because of shared eccentricities. Bonitzer resists scoring points off a dowager’s racism or a young feminist’s indifference, thanks to his authorial integrity — his refusal to do virtue-signaling.
Bonitzer’s artistry distinguishes Auction from the formula of contemporary narratives that take advantage of the current cynicism trend represented by the TV series Succession or the films One Battle After Another and A House of Dynamite. Bonitzer downplays greed and power as motivations, undermining those negative qualities to show the virtues that can emerge from close attention to social interaction. Auction appraises the complexity of Masson’s and Aurore’s personalities; their private concerns (his divorce, her patriarchal conflict) combine with their individual passion for quality and luxe (his fascination with cars and watches, her obsession with vintage couture).
Subtlety is rare in pop fiction, but it distinguishes Auction’s depiction of the art world. Bonitzer treats the subject of art restoration and ethnic reparations almost as routine when Masson discovers the Schiele painting — hidden from the Nazis during the World War II Occupation but secreted in the home now owned by small-town factory worker Martin (Arcadi Radeff) and his mother Mme. Keller (Laurence Côte, the ingenue in Téchiné’s Les Voleurs). The standard guilt narrative about Nazi plunder, familiar from Mr. Klein and The Woman in Gold, appears when the Wahlberg family, which had fled to America during the war, claim ownership of the Schiele, but obvious guilt-mongering is replaced with a consideration of history and responsibility. (The subplot of Martin’s social awareness among ethnically integrated youth in modern France stirs Masson’s memory of his own small-town background in Xonrupt-Longemer in northeastern France. This parallel works out the belligerence of the film’s opening scene, cohering with Bonitzer’s interest in national valor.)
Schiele’s 1928 painting Wilted Sunflowers, stolen by Nazis, who then condemned it as “degenerate art,” was inspired by Van Gogh’s 1906 Sunflowers. Both paintings are newly appreciated through taste and discretion, which Masson’s ex-wife Bertina (Lea Drucker), still his confidante, describes as the difference between “experts and specialists.” Her judgment pertains to the Wahlberg family’s decision to sell Wilted Sunflowers during Adar, the Hebrew calendar’s month of justice and giving.
Auction’s original title, Le tableau volé, translates as “The Stolen Painting.” It’s Bonitzer’s evocation of Téchiné’s Les Voleurs (Thieves), which explored cultural traditions passed through family relations, just as sophistication becomes a gift passed from Masson and his urbane colleagues to country-boy Martin, whose wide-eyed exposure to Paris ends the film on a quietly stunning, generous grace note. It’s a privileged moment, evoking the quintessential country-to-city passage known to Téchiné fans (although Bonitzer includes a gratuitous same-sex kiss that’s an unworthy sop to the elite). Otherwise, Bonitzer’s generosity defines Auction as a film about values, the crucial moral equation overlooked by filmmakers who exploit our current polarization and enmity. The values on view in Auction remind us what art is for.
