Boogie Woogie

A wild and sexy satire on the art world, featuring an international star-studded cast With a top-tier international cast, the film is a drama that aims to break all taboos. Adapted by Danny Moynihan from his original novel, it marks the bold and highly successful debut of director Duncan Ward. The plot unfolds among ruthless agents, selfish artists, corrupt gallerists, and sexual predators of all kinds, in a collective hysteria that culminates in an unexpected and shocking finale. Synopsis Boogie Woogie, Danny Moynihan’s 2000 novel, is set in the New York art world, but the film takes place in present-day London. Indeed, the post-YBA English scene, with its enfants terribles, VIPs, calculated controversies, and ultra-wealthy Russian collectors, is a more fitting backdrop for this twisted tale of shady dealings and broken hearts behind the scenes of art galleries. Art Spindle—played with great intensity by Danny Huston—is a greedy gallerist obsessed with acquiring one of the last paintings from Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie series. The piece belongs to Alfred Rhinegold (Christopher Lee), an aging collector who refuses to sell, despite his wife Alfreda (Joanna Lumley) being all too aware that the £28 million offer could dramatically improve their quality of life in their final years. In the film, Rhinegold embodies the idea of collector integrity: buying art for love, not speculation. But this notion is now outdated, and younger generations have no such scruples. The hyper-prolific collector Bob Macclestone (Stellan Skarsgård) hoards artworks as if they were stocks and bonds, while his languid trophy wife Jean (Gillian Anderson) is more interested in collecting handsome young artists like Joe (Jack Huston). The artists themselves are no better: the most depraved of them all is up-and-coming video artist Elaine (Jaime Winstone), who uses her numerous conquests as raw material for her autobiographical work. Boogie Woogie makes amusing use of its star-studded cast, pairing unlikely actors together (who would have thought to put pin-up Gemma Atkinson alongside the highly serious stage actor Simon McBurney?), featuring high-class cameos (such as Charlotte Rampling), and making sophisticated nods to the actors’ past roles (Heather Graham back on roller skates, recalling her dazzling debut in Boogie Nights, a film about the porn industry). Director Duncan Ward clearly knows his subject well. Already a documentary filmmaker in the art world, he is married to renowned curator Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst. It is no surprise, then, that Boogie Woogie does not attack the motivations or value of contemporary art, nor its sky-high prices. Instead, it uses the art world in the same way Robert Altman used Hollywood in his film The Player: not as the root of human corruption, but as an environment that fosters its growth and survival.