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‘When Kate Moss met Lucian Freud’ is a fantastic premise for a film.
Back in 2002, the ultimate supermodel, then 28, sat for a portrait - in the nude, no less - for Freud, then 80, the undisputed master of figurative painting, and both the broadsheets and the tabloid press were beside themselves at the prospect. What a combination: the bombshell party girl and the reclusive genius with a habit of bedding his sitters.
There's long been intrigue over just how intimate their relationship was. So news that a film about the unlikely pairing was in the works - with Moss herself on board, as an executive producer - stirred up feverish excitement among a certain class of cinema-goers.
Surely here was all the makings of an unmissable film – glamorous It-girl, great artist, noughties London, art, intrigue, ballet flats and Vivienne Westwood pirate boots – yet Moss & Freud simply does not deliver. The scintillating subject matter is flattened into a portrayal as thin as Moss in her waif era.
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The film kicks off with the supermodel (played by Ellie Bamber) unravelling, drunkenly driving through the Cotswolds (presumably) in her convertible, narrowly avoiding getting pulled over by the police. She meets Freud (Derek Jacobi) at the National Portrait Gallery in front of Diana and Actaeon, is immediately interested in sitting for him, but balks at the commitment of three evenings a week. She unravels further: bored and diva-ish in latex at a shoot, partying with abandon at Berlin’s KitKat Club. Finally she hits rock bottom, clears her schedule, cuts her hair and is ready for the master painter. She reminds him of his former wife Caroline Blackwood, while she feels that his portrait ‘sees her’ in a way that none of the Vogue editorials have. They eat together at restaurants with white linen table cloths and Freud pelts a diner with bread rolls for taking surreptitious pictures of them.
The question everyone naturally asked when the real-life Moss and Freud were spotted together was: did they have an affair? Both were known to flout conventions, particularly Freud who had a very complicated love life (and at least 14 acknowledged children). The answer to the question, according to the film and, one presumes Moss, is: no, they did not have an affair.
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But their relationship certainly simmered with possibility. The characters are shown to take opium together on screen; Jacobi's Freud lavishes attention on Bamber as Moss while ignoring his daughter (and Moss's friend) Bella; he becomes possessive of his sitter at Moss's legendary 30th birthday (that reported Bacchanalian is rendered rather more tame on-screen).
Despite all the potential, the film simply doesn’t take off. Director James Lucas’s debut doesn’t tell us anything new about Moss or Freud. Most of the plot points and details are already known. I certainly already knew that Moss was traumatised by going topless at 17 in the Calvin Klein editorial alongside Mark Wahlberg; that she famously told her mother, ‘Why the f*** can’t I have fun all the time?’
Ellie Bamber, playing Moss, certainly nails the accent and the laugh. There is also some fun to be had in revisiting the glory days of Moss’s style - the skinny scarves, the glittering sequinned midnight-blue gown originally worn by Britt Ekland, the waistcoats - but the film really proves just how inimitable Moss’s looks and style are. Bamber is gorgeous but she doesn’t have the razor-sharp cheekbones, thousand-yard stare, and ordinary features somehow adding up to an extraordinary face which saw Moss become arguably the most influential supermodel of all time. Even though Bamber’s wardrobe was arranged by Moss’s real-life sometime stylist and best friend, James Brown, the clothes simply don't sing as they did when worn by the super, staggering through the streets of London, cigarette in hand, face forever angled away from the lens flash.
Derek Jacobi plays Freud as a kindly, almost grandfatherly figure – a far cry from the mercurial charmer many recall. There is nothing in the script that really points to a man who could, by all accounts, be a vicious character. Nor do you get a sense of Freud’s almost surgical approach to painting where his brush seemed to act more like a scalpel.
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The overall impression is that the team behind this film, perhaps understandably protective of both Moss’s legacy and that of her late friend, were hampered from including some less flattering, more revelatory details which might have made these characters and their relationship more compelling on screen.
So the audience is left watching a story that is, one suspects, a watered-down, far less compelling version of what actually happened off-screen between two surely charismatic characters who are rendered anodyne and, ultimately, unconvincing. What a pity. Moss and Freud are icons who deserve more than this film offers.
