"The Dutch Master" is a German/American co-production in the English language from 1993, so this one will have its 25th anniversary next year. Writer and director was Susan Seidelman. Short films are often a way to launch a career, but S.S. was already an established filmmaker when she made this 26-minute movie. And still it became one of her biggest successes as it managed to score an Oscar nomination losing to another German film though. The star here is actress Mira Sorvino, a couple years before her Oscar win and she plays a character that has no dialogue at all, but gets literally seduced by a painting, or lets say the man on the painting who is the title character. Occasionally the story moves away from Sorvino at times, but this is not helping the film either. The entire thing really could have been told in half the runtime, the material here is fairly. Don't get tricked by Sorvino's stunning looks into thinking this was a decent film. It was fairly boring in fact. I cannot agree with the Oscar nomination or with the fact that, probably as the result of the nomination, this little film of under half an hour made it into several film collection DVDs. It's not a failure, but ultimately very forgettable. Don't watch unless you are an Academy Award completionist or a big Mira Sorvino fan. Oh yeah, Rudolf Martin (Ari on NCIS) and John Turturro's cousin Aida (2-time Emmy nominee for The Sopranos) show up in here too.
Review of The Dutch Master
