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The Moderns (1988) 
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095649/

  Keith Carradine  ...  Nick Hart  
  Linda Fiorentino  ...  Rachel Stone  
  Wallace Shawn  ...  Oiseau  
  Geneviève Bujold  ...  Libby Valentin (as Genevieve Bujold)  
  Geraldine Chaplin  ...  Nathalie de Ville  
  Kevin J. O'Connor  ...  Hemingway  
  John Lone  ...  Bertram Stone  
  Charlélie Couture  ...  L'Evidence (as Charlelie Couture)  
  Elsa Raven  ...  Gertrude Stein  
  Ali Giron  ...  Alice B. Toklas  
  Gailard Sartain  ...  New York Critic  
  Michael Wilson  ...  Surrealist Poet  
  Robert Gould  ...  Blackie  
  Antonia Dauphin  ...  Babette  

Directed by Alan Rudolph starring a wonderful cast including Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentio, Genevieve Bujold, Geraldine Chaplin, Wallace Shawn, Kevin O’Connor, and John Lone. Although set in Paris in the 1920s, the story has relevance to our time with its insight into urban living, amorality, power, sexual politics, greed, and art as a commodity. Among the most colorful characters are a struggling artist who duplicates a Matisse, a Cezanne, and a Modigliani; a gossip columnist who finds a way to get the whole city talking about him; and a flighty, beautiful woman who refuses to be pinned down. Fans of Alan Rudolph’s distinctive storytelling will find that this film is right on the money. 

When Ernest Hemingway was an older man looking back on his youthful days in Paris in the 1920's, he wrote a candid memoir called A Moveable Feast, which was filled with anecdotes and observations about that long spring of intellectual flowering. Although his time was spent among the most famous expatriate artistic community ever assembled - people like Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Pound -  he was not always respectful of his acquaintances. He disliked the company of author Ford Madox Ford, and he loathed Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott's unbalanced wife, whose role in life seemed to be to keep Scott drunk, unproductive, and afraid of other women. He ridiculed Gertrude Stein, the would-be writer who gave The Lost Generation its name by borrowing the phrase from a garage keeper. Stein was the type of person who never talked to the wives of writers, only to writers. Hemingway was not unaware of Stein's brilliance and wit, and he actively courted her friendship and conversation at one time, but his reminiscences also focused on her egomania, her inability to tolerate any disagreement with her ideas, her inability to write anything memorable, her dislike of the drudgery of revision, her preference for forgotten hack writers over D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, and the fact that she just talked a lot of rot.

By the time Hemingway wrote his memoir, thirty years or more after the events he described, most of his cast was dead, so he felt free to write of them candidly. He was not often flattering, nor was he very flattering to himself, because he wrote the book during a time when he was beginning to question his own self-worth and the choices he had made in his life. More than anything else, A Moveable Feast is his own loud cry of Rosebud, a lament about the high price of a glittering career which had ultimately cost him his innocence, his first marriage, and his youthful happiness. As he wrote the book, Hemingway was then rapidly approaching the state of mind that would lead to his suicide. In fact, between the writing of the memoir and its publication, Papa had decided to reunite with his old crowd at their feast's new, permanent underground location.

The concept of this movie was to take those vivid characters, as seen through Hemingway's eyes, and to use them as the backdrop for a completely unrelated fictional story, thus making the fiction seem to be part of the moveable feast. In addition to the colorful characters, there was the slow, bluesy jazz of the era (the great black musicians found France more hospitable than the USA), and the unforgettable sights of Paris. It was not just eternal Paris, which is impressive enough, but Paris in the sunshine of that particular era when the long, grim winter of the first great war had ended, and the swastika had not yet emerged to eclipse the continental sun. 

And the main plot isn't so bad. An art forger creates three brilliant copies - a Matisse, a Modigliani and an uncopiable Cezanne. He works directly from the originals, which are supplied by a wealthy woman who wishes to steal the originals and leave the copies with her philandering husband. She welches on her payment, which causes the forger to withhold the originals. She then steals them back from his studio, but only the artist knows that she has inadvertently stolen the copies instead. He is therefore in possession of three paintings of great value. 

The scriptwriter is able to use this premise to comment on the value of art. The forger and his unscrupulous dealer conspire to sell the originals to a nouveau riche brute, who treasures them until they are pronounced fake by some experts who have already certified the authenticity of the copies. We then watch as the monster destroys the treasures, thinking them to be worthless. Meanwhile, the copies are hung in a gallery in the United States, where we see experts lecturing to their students about their irreproducible genius. Visiting New York later in the film, the forger, his works now hanging forever among the world's masterpieces, can't resist the temptation to eavesdrop on a professor who holds court in the museum and heaps lavish praise upon a painter, little suspecting his true identity, let alone his immediate presence.

Of course, in a sensible world, a hypothetically perfect copy of a Cezanne is just as beautiful, and therefore has in a certain sense just as much intrinsic worth as the original. It doesn't suddenly become less beautiful when someone pronounces it a copy, rather merely less original. In our world, which is perhaps less than perfectly sensible, the entire value of a creation rests not on its beauty, but on its originality. Should this be so? I don't know. Perhaps. But it is an interesting subject to discuss. I would be just as pleased to have a perfect copy of a Cezanne hang in my salon as I would be to have the original. On the other hand, I am not the right person to ask about this matter. I don't have a salon, and if I did, I would not hang a delicately blue Cezanne there because it would clash with my poster of Hulk Hogan in his canary yellow trunks.