Auction

A regular screenwriter for the likes of Jacques Rivette, André Téchiné and Raoul Peck,and a contributing critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, Pascal Bonitzer emerged in subsequent decades as an esteemed director in his own right (Rendez-Vous).

This closely observed drama, for which he also penned the script, follows André Masson (Alex Lutz), a modern art appraiser who works for an auction house. As boldly assured in his professional expertise as he is unflaggingly cool and collected with his colleagues—including his ex-partner Bettina (Léa Drucker, Last Summer), with whom he maintains a friendship—André’s routine is unexpectedly disrupted by the discovery of a long-lost work by Egon Schiele, a masterwork that had gone missing decades earlier following its confiscation by Nazi officials. The ramifications for his career, as well as his contentious relationship with his intern Aurore (Louise Chevillotte), are unexpected and transformative.

Inspired by a true story, Bonitzer skewers the absurdities of the big money art market while tempering historical and moral questions with a welcome optimism.

This smart, digressive, agreeably sardonic drama set in the art world… tracks what happens after a decades-lost painting by Egon Schiele resurfaces […] As Auction continues, issues of identity linger, and the movie quietly deepens.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

A spry and byzantine moral comedy set in the trenches of the French art business.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire

This is one dazzling movie to get deliriously lost in. Surely (Pascal Bonitzer’s) smartest, sleekest, most wickedly assured script in a sixty-year career.

Kurt Brokaw, The Independent