Crown doesn’t need to commit the crime it’s purely for his enjoyment.
The result is an incredibly stylish and sexy neo-noir filled with gorgeous cars - something that feeds into McQueen’s real-life passion for motor-racing- and fabulous fashion.īrosnan, meanwhile, portrays Crown with a Bond-esque flourish, depicting him as a sophisticated and suave billionaire-playboy-thief, in possession of self-confidence that might verge on smarmy were it not for Brosnan’s self-awareness and vitality in the role. In the 1968 original version directed by Norman Jewison, Steve McQueen stars as the cunning businessman who steals $2 million from a Boston bank, while Faye Dunaway portrays Vicki Anderson, the insurance agent tasked with investigating the crime. While remakes can often be contentious, the great strength in this one is how it utilises themes and concepts from the original Thomas Crown Affair and makes them unique, while toying with Surrealist imagery in the process. In John McTiernan’s 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown affair, Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) utilises The Son of Man’s anonymity to orchestrate his perfect heist by deploying Magritte imagery as his modus operandi. There is also great entertainment in seeing something very familiar, be it a piece of pop culture or artwork, functioning as a tool to wield power and corruption. There is great excitement in witnessing the role-play of dual identities, secret personas, and shifting allegiances. The push-and-pull between concealed and revealed is always exciting in crime films.
This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.” There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. Even with the knowledge that this is the artist himself, we still see him as faceless and without identity. In 1963 Magritte painted The Son of Man. His take on the self-portrait features a lone man wearing a red tie and a bowler hat (a frequent motif in Magritte’s work), while a green apple partially obstructs the subject’s face. They draw you in, distort your perception of reality, make you question what you are perceiving. Take the paintings of the Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte.
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