New film about forgers is ‘Miami Vice’ for the art-world crowd – The Art Newspaper

In an early scene in Forge, Emily—a Chinese American FBI agent played by Kelly Marie Tran—tries to explain the difference between a fake and a forgery to sceptical male colleagues. A fake is a copy, she tells them, and a forgery is a work made in the style of an artist and based on a work by that artist. Both gambits involve deception.

Forge is a first feature by the writer-director Jing Ai Ng, a crime thriller set in South Florida—where the art-market landscape has been transformed by the ever-rising prices achieved at Art Basel Miami Beach. Young Chinese American siblings Coco and Raymond Zhang have a scheme to paint landscapes from the early 20th century and sell them as authentic works under thick coats of varnish. So far, they have worked with a local fence named Pedro.

In a dark motel room—much of this film is faintly lit in Florida noir—the actor Andie Ju is cautious and fragile as she plays Coco, a grifter pretending to be a daughter grieving as she parts with her mother’s pictures. She is convincing enough to fool a credulous dealer (played by T.R. Knight of Grey’s Anatomy) who doubles his cash offer to $20,000 for works that Coco painted. Coco’s brother Raymond (Brandon Soo Hoo), who observes that deal, is a beach-table waiter passing himself off as a banker when he can—another twist on the notion of forgery.

The siblings’ future looks promising when they meet a rich young heir to a family fortune. The blue-blood (Edmund Donovan) inherited his grandfather’s art collection, now in shreds after a hurricane struck and rats ate through the soaked, rotting canvases. He wants the brother-sister team to create a new collection. They find an art consultant unperturbed by their scam to represent them.

The film’s dusky palette and pulsing soundtrack of loud cars and loud music echo the mix of style, risk and romantic danger that fueled Miami Vice for so many years. And art on film, set in art-enriched Miami, has been relatively unexplored territory.

The film pivots when Emily from the FBI wanders into the Zhang family’s restaurant and befriends the young siblings’ mother, who tells of Raymond’s expulsion from Duke University for selling counterfeit college identification cards. Forgery, we learn, is this generation’s family business.

And the business unravels as the agent follows its trail. The two forgers do not have powerful local friends to protect them. Yet Coco, who quit art school to help her mother, has an explanation.

“These artists are dead, they’re long gone,” she says. “I’d like to imagine they’re pleased, because they’re alive inside me. It’s not like I’m forging a check or a letter. My brother does that. And I’m definitely not hurting these artists. I love them more than the people who buy their paintings.”

When all else fails, there is always the “I did it all for love” defense, spoken without a hint of irony.

Long and sometimes clunky in its acting, Forge still has its moments. The script sets up a class struggle between first-generation Chinese Americans and a moneyed client whose family did not know enough (or might have been too lazy) to keep paintings out of a basement that could flood in one of Florida’s notorious hurricanes. The array of frames and fragments salvaged from the basement are lined up like corpses on what looks like a croquet pitch. Was the art too important to be left in the hands of rich people who could afford it?

And in the home studio where Coco paints and rusticates her forgeries, she heats varnish on a table-top burner that looks borrowed from a meth lab. It seems appropriate, albeit low-tech, for a drug capital like Miami.

Forge joins another recent film about the art market set in Miami—The Gallerist, an Art Basel farce, in which Natalie Portman plays a dealer. Her booth features a spear-like object used to remove organs from cattle that kills an annoying influencer when he trips over it, just before the public walks in. The lifeless body becomes part of the ensemble on view, which critics praise.

Given the attention that major art fairs generate, more films are likely.

Watch the trailer for Forge:

• Forge opens at Los Angeles’s Landmark Nuart Theatre on 15 May, and at New York’s Quad Cinema on 22 May