Against the notion of cinematic auteurism, it has sometimes been thought enough to respond that, after all, cinema is a collaborative medium to which certain conceptions of authorship simply don’t apply. The artist-work relations involved in a Keats poem or a Cézanne painting, so this line of thinking goes, are just different in kind from that of a film by Hawks or Ford. Such responses tend to be as simplistic as the models of authorship they assume. Nevertheless, there are substantial differences in the medium-specific conditions of ascribing and acknowledging authorship and intention across the various arts. In more concrete terms: there are good reasons why Godard’s Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” (2023) and Scénarios (2024), for example, posthumously completed by producer and collaborator Fabrice Aragno, are not considered forgeries.
A chamber comedy set in the contemporary art world, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers deftly examines the tangle of issues — art, authorship, authenticity — in this vicinity. When first introduced, Lori (Michaela Coel) is splitting her time sketching an urban landscape and working at a food truck. We soon learn that she is, or was, a painter. And when the greedy heirs of renowned painter Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) approach her with a proposition to secretly complete a famous series of works known as the Christophers, we learn that she was perhaps quite a good one. Or, at least, that she is knowledgeable enough about Sklar’s work to be the right person for the job. We also learn that she may have some score to settle with the aging artist. When she interviews for, and then takes, a job as Sklar’s assistant, the question becomes just how she might do this — and for what reasons.
Made from a script by Ed Solomon, The Christophers mainly turns on the push-pull dynamic between Lori and Sklar. As Sklar, an aging painter who has lapsed into irrelevance, having produced nothing of note in decades, and who now spends his time livestreaming invective on some web series, McKellan creates a brashly entertaining character — a person outwardly oblivious but just a touch too self-aware to not know that he is self-deluding. As Lori, meanwhile, Coel expertly creates a sense of mystery about her motives, especially the non-monetary reasons that she might have for taking on such a project to begin with. Together, the pair’s performances provide a superbly entertaining ballast for the heady philosophical questions that arise over the course of the film. If Lori completing the Christophers without Sklar’s consent would unambiguously be a forgery, would her completing them under his supervision, as in an earlier studio model or as in Warhol’s Factory practice, also count as such? What sort of timespan is operative when it comes to artistic intention? Do the intentions of the younger Sklar, who was infatuated with the paintings’ subject, take precedence over those of the much-older, present-day Sklar? And is it possible to, as it were, inhabit someone’s prior intention to complete a work, even or especially if that someone is oneself?
That such questions arise is, to a degree, simply due to the script, and would seem to have little to do with Soderbergh’s direction. But then again, it is worth noting that for this film about the complexities of art and art-making, Soderbergh has delivered his most formally self-effacing film in almost a decade. The film is not anonymous, exactly, but it doesn’t signal its intentions in the manner of, say, the point-of-view conceit of Presence (2024) or the iPhone experimentation in Unsane (2018) and High Flying Bird (2019). Mostly, Soderbergh just creates a dynamic space for his actors to perform. Of course, to even say this is to ascribe some sort of artistic intention, even if the specifics of Soderbergh’s contributions seem opaque. But then again, as Lori shows us by the end of the film, there is in this context a certain thrill in self-effacement, where as in the best of heists, success lies in finding new ways to disappear.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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