When Lucian Freud met Kate Moss turns out to be the encounter of a sweet, cuddly old gentleman and a guardedly opaque hedonist. Both look defanged.
Freud’s sensational Naked Portrait 2002 is a nude study of the supermodel, to whom he had been introduced by his daughter, the fashion designer Bella Freud. Moss was pregnant when she sat for him – which lent a fierce, additional frisson to the painting’s candour and intimacy. Ellie Bamber plays Kate and carries off the unclothed moments with great directness and aplomb. Freud is played with Germanic R sounds by Derek Jacobi (who incidentally played Freud’s contemporary Francis Bacon in John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil in 1998) and he has Freud’s buzzard-like look but not quite the sharpness and severity.
She was 28; he was 80 and his reputation as a Lothario led to all sorts of tabloid gossip about a possible relationship – though the film, for which Moss is executive producer, is burdened with the killjoy task of solemnly making it clear that this wasn’t true, while also trying to convey a kind of compensatory eroticism elsewhere – all sorts of bohemian raciness and an impossibly stylish meeting of super-hip creative minds. Yet, all too often Moss looks like a dippy trustafarian and Freud like her soppy old grandpa with whom she gets out of it on opium in the garden of his west London home while the pair of them throw back their heads, laughing life-affirmingly. Their tiffs are infrequent and unexciting.
Of course, no film can live up to the painting itself: that is where the drama and the seduction actually happened. Perhaps there was an amazing rapport between Moss and Freud or perhaps it was a businesslike arrangement – with no more of a quasi-erotic spark than there was between Freud and the more age-appropriate Queen Elizabeth II when she sat for him, fully clothed. (Maybe Jacobi and Helen Mirren can now do that film.)
This film implies that Freud got Moss to grow up and turn away from shallow partying and drugs. Well … maybe. It is on stronger ground at hinting at the selfishness of artist and model – and in fact there is a very shrewd scene when Freud turns up for Moss’s birthday party and both hurt the feelings of Bella (Jasmine Blackborow) by hardly talking to her. Both are capricious: Freud is using Moss, of course, and she is using him (and both might well have been aware of how very expensive the resulting picture was likely to be, although nothing so vulgar is explicitly mentioned).
The crunch comes when Kate sees the finished picture and is, quite understandably, lost for words. The film is too, in a way. Freud’s image is not like a fashion photo – it is utterly different from the way she has learned to see herself. It is not unflattering exactly, it has something uncompromisingly physical and sensual. And it upstages the film’s careful, legacy-controlling blandness.