★★★★☆
Four Stars
To be honest, since The Sound of Music, it has been a quiet 50 years on the films-about-Austria front. The Woman in Gold redresses this: it is about a country and its methods of coming to terms with, or evading, its history. The characters, however, are firmly at the film’s centre. The film is based on the life of Maria Altman, a Holocaust survivor and the last descendant of a wealthy Vienna family.
She struggled in her later years to have Gustav Kilmt’s painting of her aunt, the eponymous ‘Woman in Gold’, removed from the Belvedere Gallery where it was illegally placed by the Nazis, and returned to her family’s possession. Helen Mirren takes on the role of Mrs Altman with all the formidableness you can imagine, well-balanced against the poignancy and fragility that the plot demands. At the other end of the scale, Ryan Reynolds plays the thoroughly unimposing young lawyer who takes the case due to the value of the paintings in question.
The construction of the film bases itself on the idea of separation. Dividing its attention between plural locations, the film is also chronologically divided. It explores the chronology of Maria Altman’s early life and upbringing in Vienna, focusing on her escape with her husband as the Nazis take over Vienna, alongside the struggle in the mid-nineties which lead her to take the Austrian government to court over the painting. The divided chronology gives great insight into the character’s mindset, but the flashback episodes have a tendency to run on and give the overall feeling that the film’s timing has been distributed rather heavy-handedly.
Place, however, is handled much more delicately. The locations are split between Los Angeles and Vienna, and it is the latter which rightly receives the more exploratory and interesting treatment.The narrative takes a photogenic route around known one of Europe’s lesser known capital cities, offering glimpses of the Hofburg Palace, the Belvedere Gallery, the famous ferris wheel and the old streets between the Ringstrasse and the Westbahnhof. We’re shown how the gulf between the past and the present has opened up, but not so widely that it cannot be contained in the same space. The implication of the trauma this causes is far from lost.
The film gives little consideration to Klimt’s other work. Then again, it never claims to and instead takes the opportunity to focus on the personal importance of one particular work. “You see a masterpiece by one of Austria’s finestartists,” Altman says as she addresses the confer- ence for the restitution of art appropriated by the Nazis, “but I see a picture of my aunt, a woman who used to talk to me about life.
From the opening shot, a single piece of leaf gold sliced carefully in two, we see the picture as something that is made through a process of division. The situations in which we see the painting throughout the film enforce this per- ception of constant recreation hanging on the wall of Altman’s family home, packaged up and hoarded in the back of a German van, hanging on the wall of the Belvedere Gallery during and after the war – the continual separation of the painting and its subject and rightful owners.
The story exists on a basis of the re-perception of works of art and of separation, and it is when these are realigned at the end of the film, when the painting’s rightful ownership is acknowl- edged, that we are allowed a semblance of resolution. It is a far cry from the dated scenes of untouched Austria that are most familiar in Anglo-American media, but the grittier moments are more than worthwhile
