The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting


1978 painting movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A collector of paintings takes the viewer on a tour of six works of Fredéric Tonnerre and speculates on what a missing painting might have looked like.

Part-mystery and part-parody, this spell-binding French pseudo-documentary isn't quite like anything else I've ever seen before. Dueling narrators, at least one who you might say is unreliable, take the audience on a tour of this guy's three-dimensional recreations (tableaux vivants) of these six paintings, speculating on how they're connected and what their hidden meanings might be. I'm not totally sure it's presciently poking fun at Internet obsessives picking apart every last detail of a work in order to find hidden meanings that likely aren't there, but it certainly seems that way. As a bonus, this looks as good as you'd expect something from cinematographer Sacha Vierny to look. Likely, this movie being filmed in black and white is some sort of joke.

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