L'hypothèse du tableau volé (1979)

User Rating:

7.8/10   

Director:

Raoul Ruiz

Writers:

Pierre Klossowski (writer)
Raoul Ruiz (writer)

Release Date:

4 April 1979 (France)

Genre:

Drama | Mystery

Plot:

Two narrators, one seen and one unseen, discuss possible connections between a series of paintings....

Plot Keywords:

Painting | Pastiche | Painter | Parody | Long Take

Cast

Jean Rougeul	...	The collector
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Carlos Asorey
Alfred Baillou
Corinne Berjot
Jean Bessière
Guy Bonnafoux
Aldo Boselli
Christian Broutin
Jacques Brunswig
Oreste Canakis
Philippe Chassel
Nadège Clair		(as Nadege Finkelstein)
Alix Comte
Bernard Daillencourt
Marthe Delboy
Anne Desbois
Denis Develoux
Daniel Grimm
Bruno Guillain
Claude Hernin-Helbaut
Dominique Lambertini
Pascal Lambertini
Pierre Latzko
Daniel Musa
Jean Narboni
Chantal Paley
Raymond Pierson
Jean Raynaud
Jean Reno
Tony Rödel
Isidro Romero
Eric Saulnier
Stéphane Shandor
Vincent Skimenti
Raymond Soriano
Jean-Damien Thiollier

Also Known As:

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (International: English title)

Runtime:

66 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA)

surrealism, art history, conspiracies and just plain weirdness

L'Hypothèse du tableau volé/The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979) begins in the courtyard of an old, three-story Parisian apartment building. Inside, we meet The Collector, an elderly man who has apparently devoted his life to the study of the six known existing paints of an obscure Impressionist-era painter, Tonnerre. A narrator recites various epigrams about art and painting, and then engages in a dialogue with The Collector, who describes the paintings to us, shows them to us, tells us a little bit about the painter and the scandal that brought him down, and then tells us he's going to show us something....

As he walks through a doorway, we enter another world, or worlds, or perhaps to stretch to the limits, other possible worlds. The Collector shows us through his apparently limitless house, including a large yard full of trees with a hill; within these confines are the 6 paintings come to life, or half-way to life as he walks us through various tableaux and describes to us the possible meanings of each painting, of the work as a whole, of a whole secret history behind the paintings, the scandal, the people in the paintings, the novel that may have inspired the paintings. And so on, and so on. Every room, every description, leads us deeper into a labyrinth, and all the while The Collector and The Narrator engage in their separate monologues, very occasionally verging into dialogue, but mostly staying separate and different.

I watched this a second time, so bizarre and powerful and indescribable it was, and so challenging to think or write about. If I have a guess as to what it all adds up to, it would be a sly satire of the whole nature of artistic interpretation. An indicator might be found in two of the most amusing and inexplicable scenes are those in which The Collector poses some sexless plastic figurines -- in the second of them, he also looks at photos taken of the figurines that mirror the poses in the paintings -- then he strides through his collection, which is now partially composed of life-size versions of the figures. If we think too much about it and don't just enjoy it, it all becomes just faceless plastic....

Whether I've come to any definite conclusions about "L'Hypothèse du tableau volé", or not, I can say definitely that outside of the early (and contemporaneous) works of Peter Greenaway like "A Walk Through H", I've rarely been so enthralled by something so deep, so serious, so dense....and at heart, so mischievous and fun.