Screened as part of NZIFF 2013

The Best Offer 2013

La migliore offerta

Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore

Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso) scored a hit in Italy with this romantic intrigue set in an international auction house. “Geoffrey Rush brings striking depth of character to a classic Old World mystery.” — Hollywood Reporter

Italy In English
124 minutes CinemaScope / DCP

Director, Screenplay

Producers

Isabella Cocuzza
,
Arturo Paglia

Photography

Fabio Zamarion

Editor

Massimo Quaglia

Production designer

Maurizio Sabatini

Costume designer

Maurizio Millenotti

Sound

Gilberto Martinelli

Music

Ennio Morricone

With

Geoffrey Rush (Virgil Oldman)
,
Jim Sturgess (Robert)
,
Sylvia Hoeks (Claire Ibbetson)
,
Donald Sutherland (Billy Whistler)
,
Philip Jackson (Fred)
,
Dermot Crowley (Lambert)
,
Liya Kebede (Sarah)
,
Kiruna Stamell (woman in the café)

Festivals

Berlin 2013

Elsewhere

Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso) scored a popular hit in Italy with this English-language extravaganza of Platinum Class double-dealing centreing on an international auction house. As Virgil Oldman, a fastidious connoisseur and art dealer who is not the straight operator that his priggish manner suggests, Geoffrey Rush is marvellously watchable. Drawn out of his shell rather late in life by the patent unhappiness of a mysterious young female client, we see him take his first timorous steps towards romantic connection with a living woman. In a juicy role that might have provoked shameless antics in a less resourceful actor, he renders the acquisitive old man’s new-found vulnerability rather droll and touching. 

The Best Offer chisels a complicated intrigue out of an amorphous atmosphere of neurosis, wealth, and sophistication… The combined weight of Italy’s top technicians makes itself felt in Fabio Zamarion’s smoky cinematography, Maurizio Sabatini’s lavishly refined sets, Maurizio Millenotti’s dapper costumes, Ennio Morricone’s heavily used strings. 

One magic moment which illustrates Tornatore’s visual imagination at its best is Virgil’s secret chamber, a marbled vault hung to the rafters with dozens, maybe hundreds of charming female portraits he has squirreled away, including famous faces by Raphael, Titian and Velasquez. There he spends his evenings, gazing at a female universe he dare not touch in the flesh. It offers a perfect parallel to the famous kissing sequence in Cinema Paradiso: the serial emotions of art as life perfected.” — Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter