Wri/Dir James Lucas
Top model Kate Moss clearly loves her look as much as the cameras do in this gloriously unapologetic biopic about the turbulent time when she sat for one of the most significant figurative painters of the 20th century, Lucien Freud.
The two massive egos, he was 80 she was 28, come head to head in a sun-dappled drama making its world premiere at this year’s Bfi London Film Festival. And Kate, who helped produce the film, comes across as a business woman through and through. Elie Bamber plays her with fierce self-possession but Derek Jacobi carries the film, and is by spades the finer actor here. Beautifully coiffed yet bohemian he imbues Freud with a grace and gravitas that is simply astonishing, mastering a fine Germanic accent. Lost in creative thought his Freud is not only a titan of the art world but also an erudite intellectual who manages to be cuddly and vulnerable but waspish when piqued: Moss is perpetually late for their sittings, and cannot abide her sloppy time-keeping.
‘The Naked Portrait’ began in 2002, after a rendezvous in the National Gallery arranged by Bella, a close friend of the model. The two icons capitalise on each other’s success, but that’s par for the course, and this frisson gives this film its dramatic heft, Jacobi endowing his Freud with a humanity that Bamber never conveys in Kate, whether it exists or not in real life, we certainly never get that impression.
Bamber has the body and the face for the part but her Moss comes across as shallow as a puddle. Moss, a Croydon girl made good, clearly gave her the film her blessing and helped cast Ellie Bamber whose accent is more Dagenham than Croydon.
But the voyage of discovery that Kate claims to have made during the meetings with Freud never emerges in this one note performance that showcases her hedonistic lifestyle spurred on by alcohol and fast cars: a bland bombshell driving too fast and cavorting around the fleshpots of Berlin, drunk and self-entitled, but clearly having the time of her life, and supremely able to handle Freud, an ageing lothario who is as committed to his craft as she is to making a financial success of modelling. There is a faint whiff of eroticism to their pairing which evaporates when Moss announces her pregnancy, Freud rapidly morphing into kindly old uncle mode.
The vacant look on Kate’s face when she finally sees the finished picture says it all. Not the beautiful photographic image the new mother was waiting for, but something quite different, unimaginable in her eyes, with its roughly-hewn physicality that flies in the face of her expectations. A watchable but chocolate-boxy biopic. @MeredithTaylor
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025