The Moderns

Paris, 1926. Nick Hart is an American painter who spends his days drinking in cafes and badgering his dealer to sell something of his. When a wealthy collector proposes that he forge three paintings, the money looks like a route back to his ex-wife. Her husband, a hard American industrialist, moves through exactly the same rooms. Alan Rudolph stages the Paris of the Lost Generation as one enormous scene of gossip, with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas wandering through it as characters. The question the film is actually asking is not which canvas is fake but which person in the room is genuine. Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentino, Geneviève Bujold and Geraldine Chaplin play it, and the art market takes a quiet beating throughout.