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Reviews
Tschugger (2021)
Fails by checking all the hallmarks
It has all the hallmarks checked for a typical patchwork film production. I can vividly imagine the writer sitting at his desk brainstorming the list of action points of his soon to be flick. Let us see whether he checked all the boxes: lots of drugs, sex (not too much, we are still swiss after all..), some rock n' roll, drones, swiss special forces (to please the military crowd), lots of Guns (preferably the big ones), terminator-style self-treatment of bullet wound, copious references to local cervelat-celebrities, reference to the local capo (aka chief of state aka the 'Bundesrat'), crazy secret cults with robed and masked figures, making fun of yoga-culture, nazism, social media, cars (sports cars preferably), drowning in faeces, making fun of people with speech defect, explosions, hacking, homosexuality, martial arts scene.
Quite a list. Now the whole art consists in thinking up a half-baked story that connects all of these bullet points. Stir it three times. Done!
What I personally missed was at least one little scene depicting a high speed skiing chase in the swiss alps and - zombies (do they finally get out of fashion?).
La migliore offerta (2013)
Can a painting be faked? Can Love? Great Symbolism in a great Movie
As someone else mentioned in his review, this is an intelligent film. It is mainly meant to provoke thought and not simply to entertain.
In my opinion, the main theme is not the con or the heist or even the lovestory but the philosophical relationship between true and false.
Remember that the automaton is always right according to Vergil, like the "dwarf" Claire in the cafe, who basically is 'powering' the automaton. She actually behaves like one and is always right too in her computations. So, the background story is just the vehicle for a train of thought the film might set into motion, or not.
In this review, therefore, I will not retell the plot (that has been done already) but try to interpret some of the symbolism according to what I see. This might not necessarily be what you see in it, but that makes the whole thing fun and interesting no?
There are many movies and documentaries playing on the blurry line between fake and original, between artificiality (the android) and nature (humanness), between real and unreal as well as the nature of duality in general.
Is this a surprising topic considering the medium? Since the very building blocks of film are images and fake, I do not think so.
While this movie certrainly is not of the one-of-a-kind sort, nevertheless, "The Best Offer" is an interesting one which somewhat stands out while still being underrated.
So on the very surface of it, it is just another rather mediocre 'con-flick' which the superficial mind will never get to read between the lines. But, as usual, the interesting parts are not in the printing.
Like an automaton, Vergil, the famous and successfull auctioner, is utterly devoid of any humor. He moves with an air of unfailing self-confidence, while his vices of vanity and greed are well hidden behind a stern and unfailing austerity. His exploits and misconducts as an authority of art, however, speak another language. Alas, his character is so masterfully crafted, that he starts to believe in his own fake personality so much so that he is determined to not give it up no matter what. This unyielding artificiality is where his thieving 'friends' then position the lever of the con and it is also what at the end they will mock him for. The plan then unfolds as expected. Vergil so desperately clings to his carefully created image and so desperately refuses to believe it to be otherwise than he thinks, that something had to cave in in the end and that something was his mind.
Just under the surface, the film tells us that some people will always try to get the better of us in order to get what they want. Be it monetary goods, power or just revenge. They are the exploiters of human psychology. Vampires and cannibals, feeding on their own kind. On a little less superficial level, this film is a reminder that, if we are not vigilant, life/people will cheat us endlessly by playing on false opposites such as original/fake et al.
But it does go deeper than that by pondering the age old question of "what actually is reality?". How much is what we, the observer of the movie, believe tainted by that which we want to believe? With this question in mind, the movie invites the viewer to execute some self-observation during the viewing.
Another question which is reverberating throughout the film is the question: Can love be faked? If, thinking it diligently through to the end, duality, and with that, reality is fake then what is 'love'? We always seek love. Real, idealistic love. We never find it.
While it always seems "just around the corner", similar to reality, pure love cannot be experienced. We certainly can feel it like we can hear sound. But is this IT? As Krishnamurti never tired to say: Love is not the opposite of hate. It is not just a feeling.
It seems that all we can do is to travel but never arrive. Such is the elusiveness of live. But if life is neither fake nor original then what is it?
On that level the film reminds us that while there is certainly manifold ways how to cheat and manipulate our human contemporaries by using their gullibility and convictions against them, still there is no way to cheat life.
'Knowing life' would be a way of cheating it, therefore, we cannot know it.
Before his final breakdown, Vergil even moved to Prag, sitting in that clockwork cafe, in the belly of the android so to say, stubbornly waiting for his fake life to finally become real, when in reality his life never was a fake but did only become so by him desperately believing it to be authentic after all.
Because beyond the the duality of authenticity and fake, beyond true and false, there is always fake in authenticity and authenticity in fake as is one of the main tag lines of the movie.
Thus one sensible answer to the big question would be, that the stark reality is, that reality is what we want to believe in and that wishful thinking will always play tricks with our minds.
Perhaps, due to the elusive nature of reality, it will always be nothing less and nothing more than "just the best offer", i.e. "just the best effort" of making it up in our own mind. Is this a sad and nihilistic view of the world? You decide.