Egon Schiele - Tod und Mädchen

Precise, powerful, delicate. Egon Schiele and the women of his life. Admirable performance of Noah Saavedra, flavors of Austria of Belle Epoque, wise use of biographic details. Could it be better ? Off course ! But, in the case of Schiele, it is difficult or too subjective to define this better. The film has the precious gift to be a correct one. A good invitation to discover the fascinating universe of the art of Egon Schiele. A sketch, maybe, but, obvious, an inspired one, reflecting care and science and admiration for the great artist. Not a story about a genius but portrait of an exceptional young man and his reflections of emotions in a special, profound special art. So, a beautiful sketch.

A biopic of Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), what instantaneously catches our eyes is the pulchritude of its leading actor Noah Saavedra, whose Adonis appearance becomes almost too distracting for the movie's own good, but it shouldn't take the credit away from Saavedra's immersed embodiment of the ill-reputed expressionist, who leaves a vast legacy to this world after his own ephemeral and turbulent life.

After opening the picture with a frenzied sequence of some sort of familial turmoil and envisaging a moribund Schiele smitten with the Spanish flu pandemic in his last days, director Dieter Berner discerningly unspools Schiele's final decade chronologically through the relations with his models: from his underage sister Gerti (Riegner), with whom he forms an intimate bond teetering on the brink of incest, to a tableau-vivant performer Moa (Breidbach), then his bona-fide muse Wally Neuzil (Pachner), whom he first encounters in the studio of his mentor Klimt (Obonya), until his ill- matched bourgeois wife Edith Harms (Marie Jung), only to coyly divulge Schiele's feckless penchant towards his conquests, chiefly for the sake of artistic inspiration and utilitarian purpose, art first, women second, seems a fitting watchword for him.

It is Egon and Wally's romantic liaison highlights the narrative, and a sylph-like Valerie Pachner gives her best in projecting Wally's emotional gamut out of their artist-and-muse equilibrium, in particular during Schiele's scandalous trial of pornography and pedophilia (another taboo topic subjected to an ambiguous brush), her conflicted reaction stays with audience longer than the artist's outrage of witnessing one of his paintings being torched. But Berner ultimately sweetens the pill of their fallout, which prompts the name-change of the film's titular painting, out of the reverence to Egon's posthumous fame.

As picturesque as a painter's biopic could ever be, Berner's diligent but anodyne work doesn't pack a substantial punch which would be in concordance with his subject's singularities, especially that unique characteristic stemming from his licentious, tempestuous persona, still eludes us after him shuffling off this mortal coil.

It is always complicated to convey the essence of a great artist through cinema or TV.

This film is simple and delicate. The main actor is very intense and does a wonderful job in portraying Egon Schiele. All of the actors are very good, really. Unfortunately, their performances are not enough to elevate the film much above mediocrity. However, if the author fails to catch the true spirit of such an extraordinary and revolutionary genius, he succeeds in depicting the profound sense of melancholy and sadness, uncertainty and disenchantment that permeated Europe throughout First World War.

Biopic of expressionist artist Egon Schiele. It's a little artsy (!) but all in all pretty good. What exquisite bodies the two females who play his main models are endowed with. The movie tells his story with a good flow; it makes me want to read up on his life.

Despite being quite a popular and well established genre, biographical films about artists succeed quite seldom to become consistent works of art by themselves. In many cases they deal with personalities whose art and biographies are reasonably or well known to the audiences. The personalities of the artists, the environment they lived within, their relations with the society and the personal lives, in some cases controversial are good material, but the script writers, directors and actors have to match their cinematic work with the expectations, have to bring enough new elements to make the films interesting and above all have a formidable competitor for their films in the art created by the heroes of their stories. Austrian director Dieter Berner's tentative with "Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden" (or "Egon Schiele: Tod und Mädchen" in German) is a good exemplification of a diligent tentative that does not succeed to avoid all the traps and surface above the crowd.

Egon Schiele was one of the lead artists in the period of art flourishing at the beginning of the 20th century in Austria. While post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism was changing in a revolutionary manner the history of art in France, and while German artists were building the foundations of Expressionism and Abstract art, their Austrian colleagues of generation were shattering the bourgeois establishment with a more subtle and subversive approach. Certainly, the works of Klimt and Schiele were defining new aesthetic codes, but their attack on the conservative art was coming mostly on the moral grounds. In the decadent atmosphere of the end of the empire, they were living a free and amoral life according to the codes of their time, and this was reflected openly in their art. Egon Klimt, whose last eight years of his short life are described in the film, lived in a passionate but also deeply anxious manner. Had death not cut short his life (he died in the terrible flu epidemic in the last month of the war) he may have joined the expressionist current, and maybe become a great anti-war artist such as Otto Dix.

Unfortunately, little of the torments of the artist are translated to screen in "Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden". We are served with a quite documented biographical film, which is as much as I can judge close and true to the facts that we know about his life. The focus of the script and of the film director was directed to the historical details and the sentimental life of the painter. There is too little in the film that can explain the psychological shock that one feels when looking at the paintings and drawings of Schiele, the deep mute shout that comes from the lines, the forms, the expressions of the people (mostly women) that he painted. The team of artists (Noah Saavedra, Maresi Riegner, Valerie Pachner) is very well selected, and their acting reveals a little more than the script does, but this is still enough. Director Dieter Berner succeeded to make a rather conventional film about a provoking artist.