Raúl Ruiz’ meditation on Viennese fin-de-siècle painter Gustav Klimt, as played by John Malkovich in his aptly titled Klimt, is certainly a period film but far from a classical historical biopic with a linear narrative. Instead it explores the ills as well as the thrills of that specific period and personality in a holistic way, similar to Forman’s artistic meditation on Mozart, Amadeus, though Ruiz never exactly reaches the heights of Forman’s formal masterpiece, also because one central focus ("jealousy" in Amadeus) is missing here.

The Chilean director and longtime resident of France approaches the story of Klimt as something which should be understood through the eyes of Klimt, something kaleidoscopic, mysterious, passionate and with a hint of danger that lurks beneath the surface. The film has been constructed as a series of scenes from the life of Klimt that show different facets of his personality and of life in Vienna at the fin-de-siècle.

Malkovich is an excellent choice for the complicated character of Klimt and the choice of Malkovich dictated the English language for the film, though because of pan-European financing (from the UK, Austria and Germany) the film suffers from the "Europudding accent syndrome" in most of its secondary roles. There is a surprising amount of discussion and dialogue in a film that is so focussed on its visuals (contrast this with the long silences of the Vermeer biopic Girl with a Pearl Earring) as well as quite a large amount of female nudity. The combination of copious amounts of talk in several tongues and kinky games with scantily clad women at times makes Klimt feel like Eyes Wide Shut as directed by Manoel de Oliveira. Not surprising perhaps, because Arthur Schnitzler, who wrote the original Traumnovelle on which Eyes Wide Shut was based, was a contemporary of Klimt.

Much less uneven than its sometimes hokey, fits-and-starts storytelling is its visually sparkling style, which uses costume and set design as well as the cinematography (often bathed in a warm amber light) to create a very particular atmosphere that immediately reminds one of the works of Klimt. Every frame is drenched in the style that made him famous, as if the entire world that orbited around the painter looked like a perpetual painting-to-be. At two hours and ten minutes, the director’s cut which was screened here at the International Film Festival Rotterdam is too long to maintain our attention throughout. Because of Ruiz’ special attention to thematic continuity rather than narrative, Klimt becomes that rare thing: a film that could have benefited from less narrative exposition in order to render its underlying themes more prominently visible.