When James Figueras was a young, neophyte artist, he was blessed with a good teacher who suggested that he was better at talking about art than painting it. And rather than take that as a painful rebuke, he saw it as wise guidance and became a painter of words: an art critic.
These days, James can face a seminar class of art lovers and mystify them. He can weave such a dazzling story that a canvas splashed with paint can go from seeming uninspiring to being esteemed as a work of great beauty in the course of a short talk. And it wouldn’t matter a whit if what he said about it was actually true or not.
It’s all in the practiced telling. It’s all in his use of color and texture, words as deftly applied as an artist’s brush strokes. James’ words were enough to draw the attention of a pretty woman named Berenice who just happened into his class while wandering the streets of Milan. And they were more than enough to help whisk her into James’ bed, too.
Berenice is not without her own charms, of course. She’s witty and able to trade well-woven sentences nearly as well as her art-critic lover. And before you know it, James invites her to join him on a weekend jaunt.
In the outskirts of Milan, a very wealthy man has a summer villa. And he has asked the silver-tongued James to meet with him for a short visit. The rich man, Joseph Cassidy, is known as a collector of great art. James is fairly sure the guy simply wants him to praise his collection, maybe write something about it.
When the three meet and begin conversing, however, it doesn’t take long to see that Cassidy is no slouch when it comes to creating frescoes of words either. Words and lies come as easily to his lips as they do to James’. In fact, all three people have their own way with the not-quite-truthful stories they’re painting.
And Cassidy has an audacious scheme to put James’ artful lying to work on his behalf.
The most likeable characters here are Berenice and an elderly artist (living on the edge of Joseph Cassidy’s property) by the name of Jerome Debney. Neither are necessarily people without stain, but both seem to be examining their past and wrestling with their self-described sins. Berenice eventually tries to push James to turn away from a great wrong he’s in the process of committing.
Joseph Cassidy rightly suggests that one should never let “a thing’s worth obscure it’s value.” He’s talking about a pair of paintings that are important to him, even though he couldn’t sell them for much.
When Jerome Debney offers James the chance of an interview, James is overjoyed and calls it the Holy Grail of interviews. Debney replies that the “gods would not approve,” of such a classification.
Flies are used as and imagery of sin and wrongdoing in the movie. At one point, Debney compares the insects to regrets: “One can either feel tormented or learn to endure their presence,” he says.
Someone makes note of a small detail on a painting and states that the choice was like the artist “printing the mark of Cain on his forehead.”
James and Berenice have sex, and the camera stays with them through several short scenes involving movements and sound. Both are nude, and the camera pictures close-ups from the waist up. (Both lounge around and talk afterward, again naked from the waist up.)
James takes a bath. And then he stands up fully nude, with the camera barely cutting away from a full frontal shot of him.
Berenice also wears a bikini and revealing bedwear. And Cassidy notes that while in Italy, James picked up and had sex with several other women besides Berenice. Jerome Debney talks of having a late-night meeting with a nearby widow.
Berenice talks about having an affair with a man and getting pregnant, then having to fly to Italy to seek an abortion. While there, she says she decided to “play the whore for a while.”
A man and woman struggle in a bathroom, and he wrestles her around, chokes her and submerges her face underwater until she apparently drowns. A guy also hits a woman in the face with a glass ashtray, killing her and leaving hair and gore on the ashtray’s corner. The dead woman is wrapped in a blanket, taken to a lake and submerged.
Someone sets a building on fire and watches it go up in a blaze. We’re told of a man being “gutted” in a German concentration camp. Someone trying to break into a building smashes himself in the face with a window shutter. His nose bleeds profusely. A man who drowned is later found and described as being “blue and bloated.”
Ten f-words, one s-word and exclamations of “a–hole,” “b—tard” and “b–ch.” We also hear one harsh vulgarity related to oral sex. Jesus’ name is mixed with an f-word.
James and Berenice both smoke. He, on the other hand, is something of a chain-smoker. And he’s also an addict. This shows up initially when he offers Berenice a prescription pill as a morning pick-me-up. But then he pops more and more of that drug and other barbiturates as his tension-levels rise. We see people drinking wine and other mixed drinks.
We find out that James was guilty of embezzlement and purposely validating an art forgery for money in his past. Cassidy offers James a chance at great notoriety as part of a scheme involving theft. While James is in the tub, Berenice walks in, drops her underwear and urinates in the nearby toilet (we only see her bare legs and part of her backside). Someone talks of destroying his own work in an effort to hold onto a potentially undeserved fame. Art theft and forgery are part of the story mix.
Through deftly worded interplay and tense scenes, you could say that The Burnt Orange Heresy strongly illustrates the old saw that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—especially when it comes to great art. Or, perhaps saying that beauty is in the lie of the beholder is closer. Because that’s what we find here: This leisurely paced film declares that our lies, sins and foul choices mark us, painting our worlds in dark, disquieting shades.
In one scene, for instance, an elderly, well-respected artist talks with Berenice about the choices and misdeeds we make that force us to wear masks. And he says that after decades of bad choices, “it’s masks all the way down” for him. But then he asks if there’s anything left of her beneath her façade, and she replies that she thinks there is. “Then it’s not too late, is it?” he notes.
In that sense, this film makes an almost spiritual point about pausing long enough in life to examine the colors and choices we’ve splashed about. But it also paints a rather dour view of life, suggesting there’s little hope of escape from those choices. And it does so through scenes peppered with fleshy lust, brutal murder and ineluctable deceit.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
