Ein seltsames Gemälde

A parsimonious brush-stroke of German Expressionism, Ein seltsames Gemälde is less a narrative than a fevered canvas come alive. Franz Hofer’s scenario follows Martin Wolff’s reclusive painter, whose attic studio reeks of turpentine and repression; he acquires a half-finished portrait of a woman whose eyes seem to track every flicker of lamplight. As he daubs pigment into her vacant gaze, the pigment begins to daub him back: pigments flake off the linen and cling to his skin like leeches, the portrait’s mouth bleeds into his coffee, and Lissi Lind’s model—once flesh—steps out of the frame as both muse and inquisitor, her costume a 1914 evening gown that drips with wet oils. The film’s Berlin is a chiaroscuro labyrinth of gaslit alleys, pawn-shop crucifixes, and carnival spiegeltents where mirrors invert desire; every interior is overstuffed with baroque clutter so that the camera appears to crawl through the still-life of a mind imploding. Hofer cross-cuts between the painter’s obsessive layering and the woman’s sardonic interrogation of authorship: who is the real image, the one who holds the brush or the one who returns the gaze? In the climactic salon exhibition, patrons in domino masks bid on the canvas while the living woman stands beside it, indistinguishable from her painted double; when the hammer falls, the frame splits, the gallery floods with scarlet varnish, and Wolff is left clutching a hollow stretcher—his masterpiece, himself, and his tormentor all erased into one obliterated rectangle of light.