The Best Offer – first look review

Bloodied but unbowed by the reception to his last film Baarìa – at least in these quarters – Giuseppe Tornatore is back, once again seeking to trap some ever-more elusive lightning in a bottle, as he did all those years ago with Cinema Paradiso. This time he's come up with a convoluted English-language art-scam/romance/thriller that sad to say, doesn't really work: the whole thing is as stiff and rigid as Geoffrey Rush's marcelled 'do.

Rush plays a lonely high-end auction-house proprietor called Virgil Oldman who leads one of those sinuously classy lifestyles you only see in the movies: fine wines, spotless tablecloths, servile waiters, and where shop assistants say "Excellent choice, sir!" without a trace of sarcasm. While Oldman is an accepted authority as an authenticator of all forms of antiquity, he is also working a fiddle: he mislabels masterpieces, then has a friend buy them at a fraction of their real value and pass them back to him. In this way, Oldman can sit obsessively in his private strongroom, gazing at his massive collection of female portraits – though, naturally, he is unmarried, has never had a girlfriend, and can't bear to be touched.

What follows is an unconventional twist on the May-December staple: Oldman falls in love with an agoraphobic young woman (Sylvia Hoeks) with a collection to sell, who has locked herself inside a secret room in a crumbling villa. They communicate mostly by shouting through the walls – that's one way for romance to blossom, I suppose – and her deeply troubled psyche makes up for the increasing implausibility of these kind of love-across-the-age-divide movie relationships. Jim Sturgess is on hand as a whizz-kid mechanic who can rescue any kind of rusted old piece of clockwork (and whose smoothie charms Oldman draws on to help further his romantic cause); a very tweedy-looking Donald Sutherland is the pal who does the naughty auction bidding at Oldman's behest.

Filmed in what you might call the international hotel style, Tornatore's idiotic premise is entertaining if you don't inspect it too carefully, or look for anything beneath the portentousness. I will say, though, the final twist is so heavily telegraphed it's almost as if a neon sign flashes up a third of the way through, with repeats every 10 minutes. Most damagingly of all though, every line of dialogue sounds as if it's been translated from the Italian using a phrasebook from the 1950s. Fine actors as Rush, Sturgess and Hoeks are, almost everything they say remains dead on the page.