Virgil Oldman, a top-class fine art appraiser, leads a polished, refined life. Somewhat eccentric, he has never been married. One day, he receives a request from an enigmatic woman to appraise the art collections in her house. Virgil gradually gets attracted to the beautiful woman, who remains hidden in her home due to extreme agoraphobia. This new film by Italian maestro Giuseppe Tornatore is an absorbing romantic thriller, in which love is compared to a work of art. The question of forgery and the boundary between truth and false, applicable to both love and art, is the theme. Unforeseeable story, based on a well-constructed scenario, enacted through enthusiastic performance of the actors, is sheerly breathtaking. The final reversal is the highlight. A line in the film, that suggests that even an expert forger is apt to leave the trace of his handwriting some day, could be a hint as to whether the love in this film is genuine. (RHEE Soue-won)