Only one of the dozen or so characters in “Boogie Woogie,” Duncan Ward’s beyond-nasty art-world satire, has the semblance of a soul. He is Dewey (Alan Cumming), a gay London gadabout and the best friend and promoter of Elaine (Jaime Winstone), an artistic exhibitionist whose would-be chef-d’oeuvre is a video diary of her ravenous sex life. That diary focuses on her lesbian encounters with women she stalks and surreptitiously records during their steamy couplings. Some might call it pornography.


When Elaine emerges as the new hot property in a thoroughly corrupt scene of scheming, lying, cheating and double-dealing on every level, the naïve Dewey is sacrificed to the wolves. Elaine’s parting gesture to her blubbering mentor is an extended middle finger.

The movie’s title refers to a series of Mondrian paintings, one of which is possessed by Alfred (Christopher Lee), an ailing collector with financial problems whose wife, Alfreda (Joanna Lumley), urges him to sell it. The middle man, Alfred’s secretary, Robert (Simon McBurney), is an aspiring painter in his own right, and a colder piece of work you will not meet onscreen or off.

But that description could just as well apply to Spindle (Danny Huston), the big wheeler-dealer who keeps a telescope in his office to spy on the gallery across the street, and to Maclestone (Stellan Skarsgard), a wealthy collector and rival with whom he feigns a buddy-buddy relationship. Both long to get their grubby mitts on the Mondrian at a bargain price.

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