LIGHTS, CAMERA, BIDDING: PASCAL BONITZER’S AUCTION STEPS UP TO THE ROSTRUM OF GREAT ART-WORLD FILMS

What could be more dramatic than an auction? Time is short. Stakes are high. Powerful personalities elbow-to-elbow, jostling for their positions as millions of dollars, pounds, euros fly by. In the salesroom, there’s no space for false moves. What a setup! And yet, in the history of cinema, it’s one deployed oh-so-sparingly by filmmakers. North by Northwest (1959), The First Wives Club (1996) — those are fun auction scenes. The Best Offer (2013), starring Geoffrey Rush, is about an auctioneer, and it features a dandy auction sequence...but alas, the rest of the movie isn’t very good. Not terrible. Just OK. Which is often the result when filmmakers take a run at depicting the art world — probably because the people who make films, like most other people who aren’t producing, dealing or collecting art, are mystified by the industry’s machinations. What is, say, a Basquiat worth? What do you mean by “worth”? These are head-scrambling questions, difficult to unpack via non-didactic dialogue, for casual viewers.

Auction, a new film written and directed by Pascal Bonitzer and now screening at Film Forum in New York — right on cue for auction season — is one of the rare art-world movies that truly knows its stuff. Alex Lutz plays auctioneer André Masson, a wry nod to the French Surrealist, who is gleefully ruthless in his pursuit of masterpieces to put under the gavel at his Paris house. Then a fictional painting by Egon Schiele with a, shall we say, vexing provenance emerges. Bonitzer sets up what can best be called an amorality tale, verging on but never tipping into satire, that unspools in a taut 90 minutes. (Note to Hollywood filmmakers: yes, movies can be this short.) If you like movies and you love art, it’s a must-see — joining a small canon alongside Ruben Ostlünd’s Palme d’Or-winning satire The Square (2017), about a narcissistic curator (Claes Bang) and his personal and professional crises as he mounts a controversial museum exhibition.

Amoral auctioneers. Narcissistic curators. Can’t anyone in the onscreen art world be nice? At least they’re not sociopaths, like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. There have been various onscreen iterations of the fictional fraudster, starting with Alain Delon’s portrayal of the character in Purple Noon (1960), but his relationship to art has sometimes been given short shrift. The recent Netflix series Ripley, starring Andrew Scott, gives us Tom Ripley’s origin story, art-wise, and features numerous works by Caravaggio and Picasso. This helps explain how Ripley winds up an art dealer — an apotheosis you may witness in either Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game (2002), toplined by John Malkovich, or Wim Wenders’ loopy, indelible masterpiece The American Friend (1977), which features Dennis Hopper as the murderous Ripley. Delon, meanwhile, would get a chance to play a Parisian art dealer in Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976), conducting himself with opportunistic disregard during the Occupation. Still not nice! In Losey’s magnificent, unsettling film, he gets what’s coming to him.

Films that address the looting of art during World War II constitute a subgenre of its own. It includes The Monuments Men (2014), directed by and starring George Clooney, which dramatizes the work of a group of art historians and curators who volunteered for the United States Army to aid the recovery of stolen cultural artifacts, and The Last Vermeer (2019) about a master forger — Guy Pearce, lately of The Brutalist (2024) — who sells counterfeit Vermeers to the Nazis. But the best-known of these films is likely Woman in Gold (2015), which recounts the story of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1903–07). Seized by the Nazis during the war, the painting became the subject of a landmark restitution claim brought by Maria Altmann, portrayed by Helen Mirren. After its return, Altmann sold the work for a then-record price of $135 million. It now hangs at the Neue Galerie in New York.

There are, of course, also films about stealing art, the most stylish of which is the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. But what about the art itself? It only exists because someone made it — and you can go down a rabbit hole watching artist biopics without learning the first thing about what actually makes a person pick up a paintbrush. Roger Ebert called Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991) “the best film I have ever seen about the creation of art,” and by the end of the film’s languid four-hour runtime (note to Hollywood filmmakers: yes, films can be this long, if they’re good), you feel you’ve lived inside its romantic triangle of young model, aging artist, and wife and muse. Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) is shorter but no less immersive (you’ll never look at 18th-century portraiture the same way), as is Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014), the rare biopic to create a fly-on-the-wall sense of emotional reality (you’ll never look at a J.M.W. Turner painting the same way).

True, some biopics aren’t going for that — see Derek Jarman’s sumptuous and strange Caravaggio (1986). But all too often, the way films fail in depicting the creative life is by leaving out the boring stuff. Another movie now in theaters Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), directed by Ira Sachs (Passages, 2023), is all about the “boring” stuff — and that’s what makes it brilliant. A two-hander starring the marvelous Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, Sachs’ movie brings to life a taped 1974 conversation between the photographer and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz, and what it gets at is the way inspiration is part of the texture of the everyday, springing up like a weed through sidewalk cracks, looking for the sunlight.

The art world is full of stories, from the beautifully mundane to the pointedly ridiculous. It’s ripe for cinematic intervention — the collectors, the dealers, the globetrotting contemporary artists, the museums, the galleries, the fairs. This last group is next to get its moment in the spotlight. A new film directed by Cathy Yan, working title The Gallerist, is due out next year; it stars Jenna Ortega and Natalie Portman, and so far, what’s been revealed about the absurdist plot is that it’s about a desperate fictional art dealer who tries to sell a dead man at Miami Art Basel. We’ll see.