Virgil Oldman is an auctioneer: he helps to determine the price of art in public, rule-based jousts. He is rich, middle-aged, well-respected, if somewhat eccentric and misanthropic. He is an avowed bachelor, the kind of man who has transformed his firewalled reclusiveness into a prideful ideology. He adores women – but only of the two-dimensional kind, in captive portraits which he suspends in a vault in the recesses of his gloomy mansion. He is also a con-artist: he knows the correct prices of all items, but profitably misleads others in cahoots with a swindler artist, Billy. The movie revolves around this dichotomy: the price of everything and the value of nothing. Of course, the main protagonist’s name gives up the game: the poet Virgil was publicly disgraced when he fell in love with the wily Lucretia.

When this latter-day Virgil meets the agoraphobic Claire, he is smitten with her and besotted despite her extreme approach-avoidance games – or maybe because of them. Oldman (yes: Old man) is supposed to auction off a collection of art and antiques Claire had inherited from her deceased parents. Robert, a friend of Virgil’s, coaches him in the art of courting women and reassembles an ancient automaton from mechanical parts that Virgil finds strewn in Claire’s sprawling abode. The movie is anything but subtle and the reconstructed robot is a parable and metaphor corresponding to Virgil’s own resurrection as a man and, indeed, a living human being whose robotic days are past him, now that he had met the only love of his barren existence. In her home he finds the broken pieces. Love and friendship bring him back to life after decades of mechanical disintegration.

Love does wonders for Claire as well. It ostensibly heals her agoraphobia and she moves to cohabit with Virgil. She confesses her emotions when Virgil entrusts her with access to his priceless collection: money is known to have this amorous effect on some people. Momentarily, Claire, Billy, and Robert collude to deprive Virgil of his museal pride and joy. In the wake of the robbery, Robert leaves behind the now functioning robot with a message: even a forger is an artist of sorts. After a spell in a mental asylum, Virgil is left to ponder whether Claire’s passionate lovemaking and professions of love were as contrived as the forgeries he came across in his career. Ironically, Virgil’s forte was passing off genuine art as fake in order to deceive trusting clients into selling cheap. Now he is faced with the opposite conundrum: was Claire a forgery passed off as real art?

But the film raises more profound and troubling issues.

Was Virgil truly conned? Granted: Claire did not spell out her agenda, let alone the con. But Virgil should have seen through her, he should have known better, experienced and uniquely equipped as he was to do so. His gullibility appears contrived: as though he wanted Claire to devastate the penal colony that his life had become. Don’t we often invite others into our lives in order to disrupt them because we feel trapped and incapable of growth? Claire was Virgil’s agent of change. She transformed his life by ruining it. She sprang him from his vault by emptying its contents.

Then there is the question: was Claire for real? Did she really love Virgil? She appeared real enough to him, that is for sure. But what if happiness is the outcome of a delusion, of insanity, or a shared psychosis? Denying reality and living in a fantasy make some people elated. People collude to create imaginary spaces - like nations, or cults, or religions, or, indeed, romantic couples - where they feel safe, optimistic, and content.

Is such felicity which is divorced from reality - real? Do we have to intervene with psychotherapy to wake up these deluded souls and reintroduce them to the world? Or should we leave them to their bliss, however outlandish?

The surprising answer is that people who are both joyful and functional require no help, healing, or behavior modification even if their well-being is based on a patently fictitious narrative. If people are made cheerful by believing in the existence of a god, or that their nation is superior, or by harboring a grandiose view of their talents and qualities - good for them. As long as it does not interfere with their functioning in any way, it is not harmful to themselves or to others, they can sustain the fiction financially and psychologically, and as long as they feel at ease with who they are (ego syntony) - all is well. Placebos are often more effective than real medication. Virgil was beside himself with happiness and that is all that matters and all that mattered to him.

But, many would say, what Claire did to Virgil was unfair: she took away his prized possessions, having manipulated his emotions cruelly. I disagree. Claire gave Virgil 2 years of happiness and in return took all his paintings. It strikes me as a balanced trade. Better a short period of bliss in an arid life than none at all. Virgil got the better deal methinks: money and property come and go and, when the ineluctable moment is upon us, we leave them behind like so many pieces of colored glass. Happiness is the treasure that keeps on giving for as long as our memory holds. Claire gave Virgil a lasting gift – and took from him crumbling canvasses and peeling paint. She gave Virgil access to a real woman in lieu of the dead ones whose portraits he morbidly collected and revered.

Finally, Virgil himself understood that he may have paid a steep price but he did receive some valuables in return. The dénouement finds him in Prague, patiently waiting for Claire to frequent her favorite haunt and restore him to those few moments of ecstasy and bliss, the only time he felt alive.

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Author Bio

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East, as well as many other books and ebooks about topics in psychology, relationships, philosophy, economics, international affairs, and award-winning short fiction.