Meet Baron Kaspar Joachim von Utz (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a wealthy, eccentric old man, who has spent his whole life collecting the finest, rarest, beautiful porcelain figurines. He has put them on display in a large room in his apartment, while he had made his life-long partner, Marta (Brenda Fricker), his house-maid instead of marrying her.
One day, Baron von Utz meets the American art-dealer Marius Fisher (Peter Riegert), and they immediately become friends, because of their common shared interest in rare pieces of collectibles. But Utz refuses to sell any part of his collection, as he is very fond of each and every piece. But one day, Utz becomes mortally ill, and hordes of ex-lovers tries to get a piece of his wealth, along with a few art-collectors and even the national museum of Prague wants his rare porcelain-pieces...but they are nowhere to be found.
Now the mystery is, what exactly has happened to all the figurines... did he give them all to Marta, his best friend Doctor Vaclav Orlik (Paul Scofield), maybe one of his former lovers, or did something completely different happen? The morale of the story is probably, that you should treasure the gift of life, instead of wasting your time (and money) on useless collections, that you can't take with you when you die anyway. Spend life doing things that make you happy, and make other people happy, and don't treasure material objects more than love and life itself. Or something like that.
It is made by George Sluizer, the same director who also made "Spoorlos" and its remake "The Vanishing", as well as River Phoenix' last movie, "Dark Blood", so you can tell he knows a thing or two about telling a good story. Furthermore, this movie is allegedly one of his own personal favorites, as he brought it with him, to the Copenhagen Film Festival, where he proudly presented it (along with the two aforementioned movies).
Overall, a very good film, recommended especially for people with huge collections of stuff, around their mid-life crisis, looking for some inspiration for the rest of their lives, and some advice on what to do with their collections, when they've grown too big for their own good.
