Starring John Malkovich and Saffron Burrows. Unrated. Plays Friday to Monday, March 30 to April 2, and Thursday, April 5

This latest period piece from émigré Chilean director Raoul Ruiz isn't so much about the life of Gustav Klimt–almost certainly the most famous Austrian painter from the years immediately preceding the First World War–as it is about the Klimtness of Klimt.

Indeed, in one way or another, virtually every shot reminds us of the elaborate, almost mystical eroticism of some of the sexiest tableaux in the entire history of western art. Entire scenes appear to be drenched in gold leaf, and the director violates the 180-degree-axis rule so often, and at such great speed, viewers are left spinning in their seats.

The film begins in 1918, with the 56-year-old painter (John Malkovich, who is made up to resemble the biopic's subject to an extraordinary degree) dying of syphilis in a hospital where most of the other patients are soldiers wounded on behalf of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire. It then flashes back to 1900–the original script by Herbert Vesely dealt with the whole of the artist's life, but Ruiz was financially constrained to be less expansive–when the artist was the central figure in art nouveau's Vienna Secession. Presumably, everything we see is jumbled up by Klimt's dying brain, so Ruiz makes no attempt to show us the paintings in the order in which they were originally created. He is equally cavalier in his employment of historical figures such as Georges Mélií¨s (Gunther Gillian) and Egon Schiele (Nikolai Kinski, the son of Klaus Kinski).

When Vesely was in charge of things, Klimt was crowded with sex scenes, but in the Ruiz version (ably translated into English by long-time collaborator Gilbert Adair) the only in-and-out we see is a brief sequence involving a one-legged soldier and a military nurse.

Nudity, however, is everywhere, naked models having as much to do with the décor as cake-filled cafés–the film was mainly shot in Vienna–and snow-draped streets.

By far the most important of these statuesque nudes is Lea de Castro (Saffron Burrows, who does a much better job of acting than she did in Troy , without looking any less foxy), a romantic vision loosely modelled on the artist's real-life love, dancer Cléo de Mérode. (An equally important phantom of the mind is a Viennese bureaucrat whose function changes constantly and who seems to have been jointly engendered by the imaginations of Franz Kafka and Robert Musil, both of whom were Klimt's contemporaries.)

As usual, Ruiz incorporates some extremely esoteric ideas into the back story of his tale (including philosophical treatises on the meaning of mirrors, and 19th-century photographs of men mutilated in South American wars), but these extremely sophisticated embellishments in no way detract from the delectation of this film. Indeed, even if you've never heard of the man in question, Klimt is a joy to behold.