Woman in Gold

We screened this film at the beginning of October. After reading the reviews I was not expecting too much - inevitably I have to write notes on films I have not seen - but in the event I was impressed.

The background to the film is the major crime of the twentieth century, but the film managed to make it personal, as well as shining a light on to an aspect of the Holocaust that is perhaps generally forgotten, but which still has an impact today.

Here are my notes:

Woman in Gold

UK/USA 2015              109 minutes

Director:                      Simon Curtis

Starring:                        Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Bruhl, Katie Holmes and Tatiana Maslany

Maria Altmann was gracious and warm, the kind of woman referred to in another era as a grande dame. Her face was lined, but her bright brown eyes still held a gaze of wonder.

“It is a very complicated story. … People always asked me, did your aunt have a mad affair with Klimt? My sister thought so. My mother – she was very Victorian – said ‘How dare you say that?  It was an intellectual friendship.’ ”

Maria looked up at a reproduction of Adele’s portrait on the wall, regarding her face thoughtfully.

“My darling,” she said finally, “Adele was a modern woman, living in the world of yesterday.”

Anne-Marie O’Connor
The Lady in Gold

 

Sixty years after she fled from Nazi persecution in Vienna an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) begins legal action to retrieve possessions that the Nazis had sized from her family. These include the painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (subsequently known as the Woman in Gold) by Gustav Klimt which after the war had been hung in an Austrian art Gallery. 

Maria Altman’s struggle to recover the Woman in Gold had already been told in a 2008 documentary film called Adele’s Wish as well as in a book called The Lady in Gold, and although inevitably there have been a few minor changes to the events of her life to make it work in dramatic terms the feature film has brought her story to a far wider audience.

Despite the success of Maria Altmann in the long and complex legal struggle depicted in the film even today in Austria the government is still displaying an irresolute attitude towards returning property stolen from their Jewish owners: Stephan Templ wrote a book that catalogued hundreds of Jewish-owned buildings seized by the Nazis that have never been returned to their rightful owners, and was subsequently found guilty of defrauding the state after omitting the name of an estranged aunt from a family restitution claim. His appeal against the sentence has received the support of 75 Holocaust historians from around the world against and an Austrian journalist who is also a Holocaust survivor commented:

“The only reason Templ was prosecuted is that he touched a nerve with his book, which reminded Austrians how they stole Jewish property”.

For Austrians Klimt’s painting of the Woman in Gold was part of their national identity, although other examples of his work in Austria did not survive the war. In1895 he had been commissioned to produce three massive paintings for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, but a public outcry from political, aesthetic and religious groups meant that they were never displayed in this location, and in 1945 retreating SS forces destroyed all three paintings.