Berlin Film Festival: Woman in Gold - movie review: 'A delightful performance from Helen Mirren'

In 2006, 89-year-old Maria Altmann won her case against the Austrian government for the restitution of five paintings by Gustav Klimt, looted from her Jewish family by the Nazis and until then displayed in the Austrian State Gallery in Vienna. The pictures included the famous portrait of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer, the Woman in Gold. Regarded as Austria’s equivalent of the Mona Lisa, it sold at auction in New York to cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for $135 million.

Altogether the paintings raised some $325 million, a sum Altmann shared with her lawyer “Randy” Schoenberg, himself the grandson of the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg. Altmann died in 2011.

Her story has previously been the subject of several documentaries: Adele’s Wish, Stealing Klimt, and The Rape of Europa. Now British director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) has turned it into a touching, effective drama, built around a delightful performance by Helen Mirren as Altmann, sharp and robust but so scarred by the loss of her family that she’s reluctant ever to go back to Austria or speak a word of German again.

It’s a heartwarming story of belated justice, soppy enough in its pre-war flashbacks, but strong in its morality and sympathy: no ambiguities here.