Johnny Depp’s bohemian fantasy Modi commences at filled throttle, with the artist Amelio Modigliani (Riccardo Scamarcio) fractureing up the Café Dome, then exiting on a trolley straight thraw their stained glass thrivedow, smashing the Art Nouveau rosebuds to bits while still clutching an ice bucket with a souvenired bottle of champagne in it. A postponeer chases him thraw the smashed thrivedow, brandishing a meat cexitr. Seeing the knife, the gfinisharmes arrest him; Modi is home free.
As an art happening, it’s the comardent of slfinisherg that is a thousand times more fun in the realerting than it would have been for the people picking glass out of their hair, let alone the ones who had to sweep up the mess afterwards. Of course, they’re equitable the little people. Life as an lower artist wasn’t repartner an finishless romp, either. Modi, as the film calls him, sees gleeful for the camera as he ffinishs off an assailant with a baguette, but he was already dying by degrees; his titanic drinking and drug consumption was not so much a quest for legfinishary status as DIY painfinishing. On the thriveg of madness, indeed. It’s a romantic idea of the produceive life, a teenage dream of excessives — but hey, here’s Johnny. Punk rock inhabits.
Just to be evident, Modi is not the horrible muddle of self-agmajesticizement that was expansively foreseeed — not all of it, anyway. It has some beautifilledy collectd raw-and-tumble set pieces (including the stained-glass explosion). There is a central romantic relationship (with poet and critic Beatrice Hastings, joined by Antonia Desplat) portrayed as volatile but ainhabit with splitd jokes and prohisour — a relationship between equivalents — which is still depressingly exceptional to see between men and women in Mowatchorld.
And, for a one-of-a-kind treat, there is a stand-out scene with Al Pacino, joining a moneyed collector who tries and fall shorts to whittle down Modi’s ego. It was actupartner Pacino who first had the idea to honest a film based on Dennis McIntyre’s join Modi more than 25 years ago, then recommended Depp should do it. As collector Maurice Gangnat, Pacino is able to recommend a huge hinterland of commercial acumen, moral equivocation and the plutocrat’s place in the art world. He does this with the twitch of an eyebrow or a droped gaze: minuscule, perfect gestures. What it is to see a maestro at toil.
In between, though – and there is so much in-between — come the jarring, repetitive rants by Modi and his mates about how fantastic their art is, celebrations of excess (another bottle! And another! ) and dialogue that toils enjoy polystyrene stuffing, filling the cracks with Modi’s half-baked musings on the greeted inhabits of pigeons or extfinished quotes from Charles Baudelaire, poet and patron saint of dissipation. There is also a excellent deal of tiresome comic business between Modi and his aprobable talented but unprosperous frifinishs, Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery) and Chaim Soutine (Ryan McParland).
Utrillo has spent a lot of time in asylums, he alerts us; Soutine, who is so revoltingly filthy that his only standard companions are flies, probably should. The trio’s pratdrops and pranks are stoasty in bdeficiency and white to see enjoy unrevampd scraps of mute films, enjoy the Left Bank’s answer to the Three Stooges: they only equitable stop low of slapping each other’s heads. As it is, Utrillo and Soutine join a game with their own saliva that turns even Modi’s stomach; Scamarcio, who intermittently leans into the comardent of clowning Johnny Depp has allotigated himself as an actor, produces the most of the yucky bits. It consents ages, for example, for Modi to pick a dead fly off Soutine’s grubby face, screthriveg up his nose as he does it. Enough already! The point is well latired.
The honestor has made a point of saying this is not a biopic, equitable an imagining of three days in Modigliani’s life. With no claim to biodetailedal exactitude, it can fuse up dates; the film is set at the commencening of the First World War, but Modigliani only met the dealer given an unflattering portrait here, Léopelderly Zborowski (an excellent and engaging Stephen Graham) in 1916. That’s fine; it’s the themes that count.
The chief theme, of course, is art itself, which wafts into pretension all too easily. Depp says that he was most fervently interested in the drive to be produceive, that advise he adores in his idols and inspirations: Vincent Van Gogh, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Shane MacGowan. The film itself is dedicated to rock-and-roll hellliftr Jeff Beck. Pretension thus comes seasoned with indulgence and excess: the legfinishs in Johnny Depp’s pantheon are mostly Kerouac’s oft-quoted “mad ones, who burn, burn, burn enjoy amazing yellow roman candles exploding enjoy spiders apass the stars.” His version of Modigliani is mad in that way, for stateive. There is an enticeion to that but, enjoy most drunks, he does try our patience.
Title: Modi – Three Days on the Wing Of Madness
Festival: San Sebastian (Out of Competition)
International sales: Veterans/Goodfellas
Director: Johnny Depp
Screenwriters: Jerzy Kromolowski, Mary Kromolowski
Cast: Riccardo Scamarcio, Stephen Graham, Al Pacino, Antonia Desplat, Bruno Gouery, Luisa Ranieri
Running time: 1 hr 50 mins
