THE BEST OFFER (La migliore offerta) directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (Italy, 2013)
The current wiki succinctly provides viewers with the bare bones of the plot of this movie by describing it as the story of “a loveless elderly man [who] intersects with an astute young man and a mysterious woman in a central European setting”.
The elderly man in question is named Virgil Oldman (‘old man’ – geddit?) and the unspecified city is probably Florence. This setting must make the fact that everyone speaks English in the original a bit weird although is less odd in the version dubbed into Italian that I saw.
Oldman is played with panache by Geoffrey Rush. He is an eccentric and mega-wealthy art dealer /auctioneer and a lifelong collector of women, albeit those safety contained on canvas and depicted by the world’s greatest portrait painters. Flesh and blood females are more of an issue and he’s not really a people person at all.
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