Boogie Woogie

Boogie Woogie

Directed by Duncan Ward

[At the IFC Center ]

Runtime: 94 min.

An exposé of the London art world and the corrupt, pretentious people who run it, Boogie Woogie submits some good actors—Gillian Anderson, Alan Cumming, Stellan Skarsgard, Amanda Seyfried—to some outrageous posturing. Open-mouthed laughter.

Lots of “Darling!” intonations. All this against a background of Damien Hirst pieces and—unfortunately— Hirst’s grisly sense of the human condition. Hirst himself curated some of the art on view, including enlarged paintings of microscopic germs and a glass-encased tumor.

Director Duncan Ward laggardly paces Danny Moynihan’s script. This doesn’t help what might well be an accurate portrayal of bourgeois decadence— especially when Ward is given to lecherous emphasis while emphasizing his characters’ lechery. Centered around attempts to buy Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” from a dying owner (Christopher Lee exclaiming: “I got it from the master himself!”), the movie attempts the examination of a scene like Robert Altman achieved in Pret-a-Porter.

But whereas Altman transcended cynicism, Ward lacks all of Mondrian’s beauty: The impressive lines of “Broadway Boogie Woogie”—its structure, openness and sense of space—have the moral order and energy this movie lacks.