KARLOVY VARY— I have a confession to make, but in doing so I hope to save you from wasting an hour and 40 minutes of your life on some transatlantic flight because that’s the only place you’ll ever catch Roberto Andò’s “The Confession,” which screened this week at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Simply put, “The Confession” (easier to find on IMDb by using its Italian title “Le confessioni”) is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in more than 10 years of covering the world’s major film festivals. And if if you’ve ever read any of my rants about Arnaud Desplechin’s unintentional Cannes laugher “Jimmy P.,” you’ll realize that’s a distinction I don’t take lightly.
Set entirely at an opulent hotel resort in either Italy or France (honestly, it doesn’t matter), the picture is basically a lecture about the evils of the International Monetary Fund and the G8 nations wrapped in a pointless movie mystery filled with an International Cast you’ll swear you recognize most of from playing stock European bad guys in one Hollywood blockbuster or another. And outside of an initial pretty aerial tracking shot, it’s comically bad. Not bad enough that’s it’s somehow enjoyable or even true camp, but bad enough for you to wonder why any of these legendary actors agreed to make it in the first place.
The set-up is simple. The head of the IMF, Daniel Roché (“Caché” star Daniel Auteuil), has invited a little-known monk, Roberto Salus (“The Great Beauty” lead Toni Servillo), to attend a weekend where economic ministers from the G8 nations are expected to make a major announcement about something or another (it’s never made clear what problem the world thinks they are tackling). Also along to provide titillating conversation for the ministers is popular children’s author Claire Seth (Connie “I’m so glad I have ‘Wonder Woman’ after this” Nielsen) and a flamboyant rock star (“The Broken Circle Breakdown” actor Johan Heldenbergh) whose only purpose in the screenplay appears to be to try to sleep with Seth and hold a glass of wine with a limp wrist.
After an opening night dinner, Roché invites Salus to his suite where he asks the monk to take his confession. The following morning Roché is found in his room dead, seemingly due to a successful suicide attempt. This puts the G8 ministers on high alert, as they believe the news of Roché’s death will cause the world’s trading markets to crash (a comical assumption that people laughed at in my theater). The head of security (Moritz Bleibtreu, barely aged a day since “Run Lola Run”) begins an investigation and Salus, who has no intention of breaking his vow of silence, is at the center of it. Get ready, though, because this is where we discover just how evil these G8 ministers are. They must discover whether Roché revealed their secret economic plan to him, a plan that will cause despair for an entire country or portion of the world (likely Greece), and they must find out now!
Meanwhile, Seth, who seems chronically depressed even though she’s wildly rich after a successful career as a pre-teen’s answer to J.K. Rowling, gets something of a kickstart once she realizes that Salus’ life is in danger. Only vaguely aware that the G8 ministers are still expected to announce something sinister despite Roché’s passing, Seth and Salus team up to try to convince the two ministers on the fence from Canada (“The Diving Bell And The Butterfly” actress Marie-Josée Croze) and Italy (“Angels & Demons” actor Pierfrancesco Favino) to change their votes so they no longer support the plan.
Will the evil G8 ministers be stopped? Will we ever find out why Roché killed himself? Why did Andò decide he needed to have Roché’s lover (“The Matrix Revolutions” actor Lambert Wilson) helicopter in to identify the body, pointlessly debate philosophy with Salus, and then leave for no apparent reason? Oh, and did we mention the mysterious American financial-industry figure that pops out of nowhere like an Occupy Wall Street version of Supreme Emperor Snoke?
The answers to any of these questions aren’t important, because Andò and his co-screenwriter Angelo Pasquini have absolutely nothing insightful to say about the problems with the global economy today except that the rich Western nations are conspiring to steal from the poor (you don’t say!). And that point is consistently brought up in grand, sweeping generalizations that sound like they’re something you’d hear in a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond flick instead of from someone well-versed in a legitimate socio-economic discussion. To make matters worse, the script is so on-the-nose that you can actually watch these great actors struggle to avoid turning their characters into one-note villains. In fact, the entire second half of the movie is cringeworthy in that respect.
You could stomach most of these problems if the film was actually entertaining in some way, but it’s not. Instead, the conversations between the characters become so predictable, so boring that you often become distracted by the wood paneling in the resort’s hotel rooms wondering if it’s something you could duplicate in your own home or apartment (granted, the use of black and white fixtures is Nancy Meyers-esque at times). And, frankly, once your movie becomes a commercial for home renovation, the message, or what’s left of it, simply doesn’t matter. [D]
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