Klimt (film)


Klimt is a 2006 Austrian art-house biographical film about the life of the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. It was written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, with an English screenplay adaptation by Gilbert Adair. The director of photography was Ricardo Aronovich, and the music was composed by Jorge Arriagada. The title role was played by John Malkovich and the cast included Stephen Dillane. Both a 130-minute-long director's cut and a shortened producer's cut of 96 minutes were shown at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival.
A few months later the film was shown at the 28th Moscow International Film Festival where it was nominated for two awards, winning the Russian Film Clubs Federation Award.

Plot

Gustav Klimt's life story unfolds in a series of disjointed sequences in the artist's mind as he lies dying of pneumonia in a Viennese hospital where he is visited by his friend, Egon Schiele. Themes within the film include Klimt's platonic friendship with Emilie Floege. Much of the film is centred on Klimt's relationship with Lea de Castro, a dancer to whom he is introduced by the film pioneer Georges Méliès.

Cast

, in The Observer described the film as calculatedly enigmatic. Cosmo Landesman, in The Sunday Times, described the film as "frigid and silly" being unnecessarily difficult to follow in the style of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, Klimt holds an approval rating of 32% based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 5.04/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Klimt is handsomely filmed, but the blurred storyline and substandard performances prove its undoing." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 44 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews."