Filmmakers have long found artistic creation both a compelling and a frustratingly elusive dramatic subject. In the right cinematic hands, artworks can be made to speak for themselves – think of the dazzling sequence of canvasses that concludes Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic of van Gogh, Lust For Life. In the wrong hands, the artist’s character and motives can all too readily lapse into cliché and banality.
Moss & Freud explores the unlikely relationship that evolved between Kate Moss and painter Lucian Freud over nine months of sitting during 2002, producing a celebrated life-size nude portrait of the then-pregnant supermodel. It later sold for £3.5m at auction.
The sessions seemingly sparked a genuine friendship, and Moss has spoken warmly, if in fairly general terms, of Freud in interviews since. But as neither the generally guarded model nor the famously reclusive painter (who died in 2011) ever offered a detailed account of the relationship, writer-director James Lucas has to invent most of what transpired between them in Freud’s Notting Hill house and studio.
Unfortunately, his own creative freedom may have been limited: the closing credits lists Moss as executive producer and the generally unadventurous Moss & Freud has a very strong flavour of “authorised version” about it.
Uninspiring portrayals
By all accounts Lucian Freud was a difficult and at times, a cruel man, but little of this comes across in Derek Jacobi’s impersonation. Tricked out with an alarming grey pompadour hat, omnipresent cravat and “churman” accent, Jacobi’s Freud is for the most part a grandfatherly sweetie. His notorious philandering is referenced in passing, but diffused by sentimental sun-drenched flashbacks to the courtship of his first wife.
His neglectful treatment of his fashion-designer daughter, Bella (Jasmine Blackborow), who brokered the portrait sessions, is played largely for laughs and as an opportunity for good Samaritan Moss (Ellie Bamber) to engineer a reconciliation. Even Freud’s notoriously unflinching and uncompromising commitment to his art manifests itself mostly as a prissy testiness about party-girl Moss’s punctuality.
Equally, and ironically, while Moss insists from the outset she wants Freud to paint her unadorned and authentic, challenging her manufactured public image, her own characterisation in the film seems just as carefully managed and manicured.
Her partying, hedonism and drug use are handled as gingerly as Freud’s womanising. Moss’s remorse at unspecified transgressions during an excursion to Berlin’s famous Berghain nightclub (depicted as a descent into an infernal S&M bacchanalia), prompts her decision to sit for Freud. This, we are encouraged to believe, also leads to a general rehabilitation, especially once she becomes pregnant by dashing journalist Jefferson Hack (Will Tudor).
Nor does her galactic celebrity – which might have offered a fascinating contrast with the highly private Freud – play much part in the story. At the time of her portrait Moss was unquestionably one of the most famous and certainly most-photographed women in the world. But here she walks the streets and parks of London prompting barely a passing glance.
Her public life as model, club fixture and tabloid obsession is handled in a series of cursory montages that punctuate the movie but offer little real connection or counterpoint to the intimate sessions with Freud that are the film’s real core.
The film clearly wants us to believe this encounter was mutually revelatory and transformative, but it struggles to explain exactly what this meant for either artist or subject. Lucas assiduously dodges any suggestion of erotic frisson between the pair, unlike the contemporary media interest. But he allows the octogenarian Freud a measure of autumnal wistfulness as he gazes at Moss’s beauty from the sidelines.
There’s little real bite, depth or tension to their exchanges and Freud’s attic studio itself (not to mention the rest of his dilapidated townhouse, whose decaying Georgian grandeur is very underutilised) is disappointingly lacking in atmosphere.
No dramatic revelations
What, exactly, changes or is revealed for either of them? It’s surely an indictment of the film’s inability to discover dramatic life in these scenes that so much weight is given to verbatim quotes from a fairly vacuous artistic manifesto Freud wrote in the 1950s for cultural-political magazine Encounter (Moss implausibly manages to unearth a copy in a secondhand bookstore).
Once or twice, upbraided by Freud for what he sees as her flaky commitment to their project, Moss insists on the personal and professional “sacrifices” she’s made in order to sit for him, but what these are or why she might have made them we are left to figure out for ourselves.
A similar fuzziness afflicts the unspecified sense of lost, or stolen, innocence hinted at in brief flashbacks of her early teenage photo shoots. As her pregnancy progresses, she relocates to the wholesome rural surroundings of her spotless and sun-dappled Cotswold home where she happily gardens and picks out baby clothes.
In the end, as so often with artist biopics, the work itself speaks with a power, directness and clarity the preceding 100 minutes largely lack. Naked Portrait, when it appears onscreen at the end of the film, remains as arresting, challenging and surprising as it was in 2002 (though its £3.5m million auction price, whatever the closing titles suggest, is surely the least interesting thing about it).
As for Moss & Freud, its own dual portrait, ultimately, is a disappointingly anodyne one.
Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
