German contemporary artist Albert Oehlen is perhaps most globally renowned for his infamous “bad paintings”, as he called them, stirring up the art market with intentionally subversive pieces fuelled by a sort of “anti-high art” sentiment. Now, he makes his first solo directorial feature-length venture with the eponymously titled, lightly satirical fictionalisation of his life Bad Painter [+leggi anche:
trailer
intervista: Albert Oehlen
scheda film], selected as one of the entries to world premiere in IFFR’s Big Screen Competition. The film’s name also makes reference to his status as one amongst the “bad boys” of the 1970s and 1980s German art scene, springing forth from a rage-against-the-machine kind of perspective.

Bouncing between self-deprecating and self-indulgent, Bad Painter emerges as a scattered docufiction and mockumentary about Oehlen’s everyday life as an artist – with odd bits of body horror thrown in. Oehlen is delightfully played by famous German character actor Udo Kier, who manages to convey the acclaimed painter's dismissive, arrogant but immensely quirky constructed personality with humour, creating a highly entertaining subject on his own. For those not so familiar with Oehlen, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing it really is the painter on screen. It ends up being Kier’s performance that carries the film through to its finale, while all other elements end up being much less remarkable.

We first witness Oehlen painting on a canvas, his inner thoughts narrated by visual artist and Sonic Youth musician Kim Gordon, who also plays an interviewer who sits down with Oehlen for several conversations. These choices go as far as feeling disorientating, taking up so little of the film’s thematic meat while never feeling connected to the rest of the movie. Likewise, Oehlen introduces a talking-head interview technique, and then never returns, collaging together different styles that don’t fit well as a whole.

Starting off more realistic – if not at least a bit kooky – the narrative, or lack thereof, becomes more and more chaotic, growing towards absurdity before flying off the rails in its final third. Although it only lasts 80 minutes, the film never finds any firm grounding, leading it to feel much longer than its actual running time. As the movie advances, Oehlen encounters big personalities of different types, including making a visit to the gallery space of former actor and current restauranteur Michael Chow, which is perhaps one of the funniest sequences as their two huge egos butt heads. However, many of the character choices simply feel like a smorgasbord of scrounged-up players from real-life Oehlen’s own life, without much intention behind their inclusion.

Viewers may feel alienated from the more surrealist scenes, as they seem to all be cut from different stylistic cloths. Stranger and stranger events begin to occur that start to distract us from the film’s journey of the first half, making one question just who Oehlen is as a subject – and certainly not a coherent one. This, of course, might be the critique of a cult of personality that the artist-slash-filmmaker is striving to make, but Bad Painter really struggles to land successfully.

Bad Painter is a German-US co-production staged by Wendy Gondeln Production and Bad Painter, Inc, with the latter also steering the world sales.