“Forge” Almost Manages to Break the Mold
The art world is filled with multi-million-dollar transactions. The highest price of a painting to date belongs to an auction sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which went for $450.3 million in 2017. Even though this sale went through the trusted auction house of Christie’s and an anonymous bidder paid that exorbitant fee, the art world doesn’t agree on who the artist behind Salvator Mundi was. If this work wasn’t painted by da Vinci, is it worth that much money? Or does the value come from something else? Jing Ai Ng’s Forge takes place in the world of art as seen by outsiders.
Coco (Andie Ju) is an art school dropout living in Miami with her younger brother, Raymond (Brandon Soo Hoo), a fellow college dropout. Their family believes Raymond works as a banker, but in reality the siblings run a forgery business. Raymond specializes in fake IDs and documents, while Coco uses her talent and admiration for famous artists to forge paintings to be sold. Their reputation puts them on the radar of Holden Beaumont (Edmund Donovan), the son of an absurdly rich dynasty. Holden has inherited the family business and has promptly run it into the ground. He sees the siblings as his ticket out, asking them to forge pieces from his grandfather’s art collection that were destroyed in a hurricane. It doesn’t take long for FBI Art Crimes agent Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran) to hear about these big sales and begin to investigate.
Forge is a critique on the American Dream that’s becoming more prevalent in art of all types. The idea of a stable life with a home and a picket fence grows less and less feasible with every passing year, so why not work the system to one’s own advantage? These people are spending millions on a piece of art they may not even like to prove to themselves and others that they can afford it. It’s no longer about the art itself, but the accompanying price tag.
Toward the middle of the movie, Coco is asked if she feels any guilt about her forgeries If she, as an artist herself, is bothered by the fact that what she’s doing could be considered stealing the work of the people who came before her and inspired her. Coco adamantly disagrees, saying that her forgeries are love letters to the artists and their work. That the research, time, effort, and care she puts into capturing the style, emotion, and look of each work has as much value as the original. It’s an interesting angle to say that something exists only because of what was made before it, but the same can be said about all art. All movies, paintings, books, sculptures, etc., borrow from the past, but it’s the contemporary artists who are inspired by and improve upon the older works who keep art moving forward.
Forge loses some of its momentum as it nears the end of the runtime. It’s compelling as an art heist story, but loses some of its punch in the final scene. The film ends too neatly, too suddenly for the murky world it takes place in. Nevertheless, Ng’s vision and slow-burn style lure the viewer in closer and closer, much like the film’s FBI agent, looking for the abnormalities that give away the true intentions of the scene. Forge is weighed down by some of the expected genre tropes of heist flicks, but manages to weave its own story about the intersection of identity and ambition in the capitalist hellscape we all live in.
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