THE LAST VERMEER

Three-and-half stars

M, 118 minutes, in cinemas March 25

This is a twisted morality tale about beauty and the eye of the beholder. The conjurer at its centre is a barely recognisable Guy Pearce as Hans Van Meegeren, a Dutch artist, dealer and forger who managed to fake a Vermeer and sell it to Hermann Goering during World War II.

In 1945, the law caught up with him and he was tried in a Dutch court for selling off the country’s cultural heritage to the Nazis. The Last Vermeer is the story of the investigation that led to his arrest with Danish-born Claes Bang, star of The Burnt Orange Heresy, another film about crime in the art world, as Joseph Piller, the military investigator who arrested and interrogated him.

Director Dan Friedkin and two teams of screenwriters have put together a fascinating, if sloppy dramatisation of the case. The film’s main flaw is its failure to tackle the fact that Van Meegeren’s efforts to emulate Vermeer look so tacky to the modern eye. How did they fool anybody who’s spent just two minutes studying a real Vermeer or even a photograph of one? That’s the question that keeps you from giving yourself over to the film.

A possible answer has come from Jonathan Lopez, author of the book on which the screenplay is based. In the 1930s, he says, art scholars were still learning about Vermeer’s relatively small output and so, were receptive to the possibility that there were more paintings to be found. More controversially, he also contends that the scholars’ supposedly expert judgment was distorted by the Nazi love of kitsch. Think about this and the bathos in Van Meegeren’s maudlin quasi-religious paintings start to make sense.

But the theory doesn’t come through in the film which concentrates on Piller’s change of attitude to this urbane and imperturbably jokey conman as he gets to know him. Pearce gives one of the best performances of his career, investing Van Meegeren with a quicksilver charm and the kind of confidence that can be acquired only through a lifetime of subterfuge. A measure of his success lies in his immense wealth, together with his ease in promoting harmony between his wife and his mistress.

In contrast, Piller’s love life is more troubled. While he spent the war fighting with the Dutch Resistance, his wife (Marie Bach Hansen) remained in Amsterdam, using her job as assistant to a Nazi bureaucrat to spy for the Resistance. Although Piller knows that her work saved lives, he can’t forgive her for his conviction that she had to sleep with the enemy to do it.

Sombre lighting and devastated streetscapes convincingly evoke the confusion and anxiety governing life in post-war Europe but the awfulness of the paintings and the melodramatic excesses of the climactic court scene do cloud the picture.