{"id":414934,"date":"2025-09-11T04:48:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T04:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/414934\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T04:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T04:48:11","slug":"steven-soderberghs-bohemian-london-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/414934\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Soderbergh\u2019s Bohemian London Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tRetirement seems to have been treating Steven Soderbergh<\/a> well; since he first mooted his withdrawal from film-making in 2012 \u2014 resulting in a four-year hiatus \u2014 he\u2019s made at least one film a year since 2017. His return, however, has seen quite a different output, even for a director who came out swinging as a quicksilver talent, investigating genre after genre but never quite settling on one or another. God knows what happened in those missing years, but, with the exception of Magic Mike\u2019s Last Dance, Soderbergh 2.0 seems to be heading in a much more personal and determinedly eccentric direction \u2014 there is seemingly no throughline that takes us here from his \u201ccomeback\u201d (2017\u2019s heist movie Logan Lucky) to now. Or even from his last film, just a few months ago, the spy thriller Black Bag, which is similar only inasmuch as it takes place entirely in London.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the surface, The Christophers<\/a> would appear to be another heist movie, albeit a much more ambiguous kind than his Ocean\u2019s trilogy and also a lot smaller in scope, with a cast of just four main players in a very idealized but never unrecognizable London. In that respect, it could be an homage to Soderbergh\u2019s hero Richard Lester\u2019s early output, which anticipated \u2014 and perhaps even invented \u2014 the \u201cSwinging London\u201d years and mythologized the British capital\u2019s swankier neighborhoods in a way that Richard Curtis would later turn into outright property porn with Notting Hill. (Happily, this film does not do that.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe heist here, though, is far from the simple in-and-out jobs of Soderbergh\u2019s previous and more famous genre movies. It begins with artist and restoration specialist Lori (Michaela Cole) being approached by an old college friend and her brother with a very specific job. Their bohemian father, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen<\/a>), is a famous artist, seemingly on death\u2019s door, and his best years are long behind him. However, he still has an unfinished series of portraits that the art world is clamoring for: The Christophers, as they are known.<\/p>\n

\n\tKnowing Lori\u2019s sketchy background as a sometime art forger, Sklar\u2019s adult children Sallie and Barnaby (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) offer her a proposition: If they hire her as the old man\u2019s assistant, and give her access to the artworks, will she finish them in his style? Lori balks at the idea but is tempted by the money. \u201cWe know why you hate him,\u201d says Barnaby, and the siblings pitch the project as \u201ca chance for revenge\u201d. (This exchange is a bit of a misdirect, since, as we will later find out, Lori\u2019s opinion of Sklar is a very complex thing.) But Lori takes the job anyway, for reasons we don\u2019t question but never quite fathom, and yes, after a very bad start, the odd couple, rather predictably start to spark. At which point Lori confesses all, and Sklar, impressed by her candor, comes round to the plan, which he fully intends to sabotage. With Lori\u2019s blessing.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom here it gets a little uneven, even though Ed Solomon<\/a>\u2019s screenplay tries hard to serve both actors\u2019 strengths equally. McKellen is just perfect as the trailblazing art star of the \u201960s and \u201970s who shocked society, and his wife and kids, when he came out as gay (\u201cI was in a throuple back when it was merely called infidelity,\u201d he says mournfully). And Michael Coel should be perfect too; the I May Destroy You star has just the right attitude and delivery to offset the broader comedy of the piece. Somehow, though, we don\u2019t get into Lori\u2019s head in the same way that we do into Julian\u2019s, most notably in the poignant scenes in which he reveals the true meaning of the Christopher paintings and why he never finished them.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps because it\u2019s a Soderbergh film, there\u2019s an expectation that there will be some sort of twist, but the twist here is that there isn\u2019t really a twist. Perhaps because he leads a very-close-second life as an artist, Soderbergh genuinely seems more interested in the questions that the story raises about art; the main one being this: if an artist takes part in his own forgery, is it forgery? The secondary questions it touches on are about personality in art; is it right to dismiss the artworks along with the artist once they\u2019ve fallen from grace, and, quite the opposite, should we tolerate terrible work from an artist in clover? Sklar is an interesting character, \u00a0a pop-art relic now bordering on alt-right, certainly inappropriate, and banned from his local art supplies shop for reasons we\u2019ll never know or understand. Lori, though, remains an enigma right through to the end.<\/p>\n

\n\tNevertheless, it\u2019s an unusually emotional film for Soderbergh, and that\u2019s what lasts; Sklar and Lori are two very different individuals brought together by a mutual and passionate interest in the exact same thing, a bond that even transcends Sklar\u2019s relationship with his own offspring, much to their horror (\u201cThe Buzzard\u201d and \u201cThe Hyena\u201d he calls them). That said, it will also strike a chord with anyone who is not so enamored with the fakery of the art world, notably when Sklar reckons the worst art in the world to be \u201cdogs playing poker \u2014 and all of Warhol\u201d. It\u2019s a tricky subject for sure, and that it works at all is down to McKellen, always game and here leaning valiantly into his mortality at the age of 86. As we know from his performance in the dire Da Vinci Code, he\u2019s an actor who gives everything his all, no strings attached. It may be a little opaque in its messaging, but The Christophers is a film that\u2019s worthy of that trust. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle:<\/strong> The Christophers
Festival:<\/strong> Toronto (Special Presentations)
Director:<\/strong> Steven Soderbergh
Screenwriter:<\/strong> Ed Solomon
Cast:<\/strong> Michaela Coel<\/a>, Ian McKellen, Jessica Gunning, James Corden
Sales agent:<\/strong> CAA
Running time:<\/strong> 1 hr 47 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Retirement seems to have been treating Steven Soderbergh well; since he first mooted his withdrawal from film-making in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,142447,393,4884,70585,257,142448,6080,142449,142450,138490,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-414934","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-ed-solomon","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-ian-mckellen","13":"tag-london","14":"tag-michaela-coel","15":"tag-review","16":"tag-steven-soderbergh","17":"tag-the-christophers","18":"tag-toronto-film-festival","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115183858722291553","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}