Egon Schiele: Excess And Punishment

A glacial, arty biopic, pruriently appointed with plenty of explicit female nudity. Austrian painter Egon Schiele (Mathieu Carriere), one of the founders of Expressionism, suffers a series of humiliations: he's busted for obscenity, his sweetheart expires, a lover dumps him, and military service during WW I proves no day at the beach. After the war, his paintings become all the rage, but he dies in the influenza epidemic of 1918. This glum, mannered attempt to enshrine Schiele as a 20th-century culture hero is largely unpersuasive; Brian Eno's spare electronic soundtrack, however, is outstanding. Director Herbert Vesely enjoyed a brief vogue during the 1950s as an ...