Netflix offered up another gem 2006’s Klimt with John Malkovich as pre-First World War Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.
What a weird, wild, wonderful movie. Full frontal nudity galore. Opulent sets and costumes. Mannered performances. Malkovich being Malkovich. Weird stuff happening all the time.
And this was the 90-minute version. Apparently the director’s cut is more than two hours long.
Has anyone else seen this movie?
I have to say that when I started the movie, I expected to learn something about Klimt and his times. Apparently, he was a real revolutionary figure in the art world, but the movie spends little time on his art or his importance.
There are many people talking about art and aesthetics in the film are left but the conversations are vague and unexplained, dropping names unfamiliar to me, like Jodl and Loos. It would have been nice to be educated to some extent.
And so many weird questions. How much of what happened in the movie was supposed to have actually been happening, as opposed to hallucinations or fever dreams?
Was there a real Lea de Castro? I mean that in more than one sense. Was there a Lea de Castro in the real world. And in the context of the movie, was there actually a Lea de Castro or were there just several people pretending to be Lea de Castro? The nameless Third Secretary was almost certainly a hallucination.
And what was the whole deal with the man watching through the one-way glass? He seemed to think he had tricked Klimt into doing something, but it’s not really clear to me what it was.
And the scene with Klimt’s mother and sister—were they really the kind who would go from completely normal to absolute lunatics at the snap of a finger? Or was that scene meant to be metaphorical?
Were all of Klimt’s … baby-mamas … really Jewish, as complained of by his sister? Did they really address him formally as “Herr Klimt”? Did he really have 30 illegitimate children? Are there any descendants of his alive today? How did they fare in the Holocaust? Would he really run into his own daughters working in brothels?