"Woman in Gold" (2015)

In September of 2012 I visited the Belvedere in Vienna for an exhibit celebrating 150 years of Klimt. I saw 30 paintings by Klimt that day, but not his most famous. Now, thanks to this film, I got to see why.

“Woman in Gold” tells more than a story of a painting being returned to its rightful owner, it is another reminder of the atrocities that people committed in the name of an ideology. And I for one never tire of those films, or at least the good ones. This is one even if it is not exactly one of the greatest. The story can drag a bit here and there, but the acting and the directing here are superb.

What I love about this account is the way the past and the present stories are intertwined. And the real highlight comes at the very end when Maria walks around the offices that occupy the apartment where she grew up. This ode to nostalgia and the desire to revisit our past is something about which I regularly fantasize. Everyone who has experienced cross-cultural, frequent moving in life longs to go back and see the places where memories were formed once again.