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<\/p>\nWhy do people make tremulous films about artists? It\u2019s a question I was close to screaming when I exited James Lucas\u2019s film of the brief encounter between the supermodel Kate Moss and the super-duper painter Lucian Freud in the coke-stoked naughty Noughties.<\/p>\n
Moss & Freud is well short of being the worst example of this failed genre. The bar here is spectacularly low and this toe-curler has some way to go before it reaches the pits of Frida, Salma Hayek\u2019s stupendously silly telling of the story of Frida Kahlo, or Pollock, Ed Harris\u2019s pool of perspiration masquerading as a film about Jackson Pollock. This is too much of a short story to fall to such Hadean depths.<\/p>\n
The action starts with one of those de rigueur contemporary claims that it was inspired by real events, then quickly deviates from them. Moss began sitting for Freud in 2002 in what was certainly an unexpected meeting of worlds. She was the seemingly ageless goddess of the waif look and ubiquitous party girl. He was the octogenarian genius whose paintings were ranked with those of the old masters and whose Pan-like appetite for young female flesh was the second thing people always knew about him. <\/p>\n
The Lucas film is a pr\u00e9cis of their encounter, the seemingly endless sittings that followed, the frissons between them and, finally, the damp denouement of the resulting painting. No, they don\u2019t shag, although the implication is that Freud wanted to but Moss didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Since it\u2019s essentially her side of the story \u2014 Moss is the executive producer \u2014 we can at least trust the film on those sorts of facts. Everything else feels more TikTok than Vasari.<\/p>\n
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Freud and Moss outside Sadie Frost\u2019s home in London, 2003<\/p>\n
SHUTTERSTOCK<\/p>\n
We meet her in full out-of-control supermodel mode, driving drunkenly into the night in a sporty convertible, music blaring, eyes popping. The car careers off the road. But there\u2019s a whole film to go, so she starts it up again and with another wild whoop sets off for her early morning meeting with Lucian. <\/p>\n
He, meanwhile, is waiting for her at the National Gallery, where she eventually finds him \u2014 in the first of many late arrivals \u2014 standing in front of Titian\u2019s Diana and Actaeon, a painting in which a doomed hunter is surrounded by a harem of naked Greek nymphs. Freud mumbles something deep about nudity and beauty and we know immediately that as sure as tits is tits Kate will end up modelling for him naked. And of course she does. <\/p>\n
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