The ANNOTICO Report
Modigliani was artistic genius and excessive hedonistic.He
was noted for
his drunken volatility and arrogance.
This film loosely spans the last three years of
Modigliani's life, from
his first meeting with the young art student Jeanne Hebuterne
in 1917 to
their deaths in 1920. It was a hectic period. The
couple produced a
daughter, Modi's health steadily declined, his first
solo show was shut
down by the police, he expired and Jeanne, eight months
pregnant with their
second, flung herself from a window the following day.
Modigliani lived from hand to mouth during his brief life,
but at a
Sotheby's art auction on November 5, 2004,
Modigliani's monumental portrait of his great love and
muse, "Jeanne
Hebuterne (devant une porte)," set an artist record,
at $31.4 million,
easily eclipsing the old mark of $26.9 million set last
year.
See a brief bio of Early Modigliani at the end.
Andy Garcia plays the Italian painter in Mick Davis' film.
Los Angeles Times
By Carina Chocano
Times Staff Writer
May 13, 2005
A great Modernist gets conventionally romanticized in
Mick Davis'
'Modigliani.' In "Modigliani," Andy Garcia plays the
Italian painter Amedeo
Modigliani, major figure in European Modernism, tubercular
party animal and
fixture of the Montparnasse cafe circuit in the early
part of the 20th
century. Scottish director Mick Davis has likened 1919
Paris to "the rock
and roll of that time." And if a portrait of the artist
as a proto-David
Lee Roth appeals, then "Modigliani" is for you.
Davis isn't the first to be seduced by the connection
between artistic
genius and hedonistic excess. (Modigliani, "Modi" to
friends, enjoyed
smoking hash, drinking naked and brawling.) Nor is he
the first to be
attracted to the notion of a community of 24-hour bohemian
party people.
But I'm pretty sure he's the first to depict Pablo Picasso
as a precursor
to Jon Lovitz, and Utrillo, Soutine and Rivera as the
Three Stooges.
Modigliani may have been noted for his drunken volatility
and arrogance,
but once you get a dozen years or so of "Behind the Musics"
and "E! True
Hollywood Stories" behind you, it's hard to get worked
up about that sort
of thing anymore. As Garcia plays him, Modi is the kind
of monster-of-rock
who swaggers into a cafe and immediately elicits sighs,
murmurs and
spontaneous applause. He doesn't trash hotel rooms, but
close. In an early
scene, he's introduced to a wealthy New York art dealer
described by a
lover as having "a lot of money, but no taste." When
the dealer expresses
an interest in his work, the artist flings the money
in his face and stalks
out of the room. (The gesture is especially baffling,
not only because it
would suggest a degree of low self-esteem not otherwise
evident in Garcia's
portrayal, but because the chronically ill, not-yet-famous
Modigliani was
as hard up as they came.)
The story loosely spans the last three years of the artist's
life, from his
first meeting with the young art student Jeanne Hebuterne
(played by Elsa
Zylberstein, a swan-necked French actress who bears a
striking resemblance
to a Modigliani portrait) in 1917 to their deaths in
1920. It was a hectic
period, which Davis loosely scrambles and compresses
for the sake of
expediency. The couple produced a daughter, Modi's health
steadily
declined, his first solo show was shut down by the police,
he expired and
Jeanne, eight months pregnant with their second, flung
herself from a
window the following day.
Apparently surmising this was not quite drama enough for
a movie, Davis has
devoted a large portion of the film to a mostly invented
rivalry between
Modi and Picasso, who go mano a mano for the top cash
prize in the "Salon
des Artistes." (This may be a reference to Modigliani's
inclusion in the
Salon d'Automne in the final months of his life, one
of several important
group exhibitions throughout Europe that included Modigliani's
work in his
lifetime.) In between bouts of drinking and getting up
in the grill of
Jeanne's father — here a symbol for all the anti-Semitism
in Paris — Modi
prepares for his big face-off with the famous Spaniard,
played by Omid
Djalili as a petulant buffoon in a bad rug. (For her
portrayal of Picasso's
Russian wife, Olga, supermodel Eva Herzigova borrows
heavily from Natasha
of "Rocky & Bullwinkle," and Romania stands in for
Paris, unconvincingly.)
Davis takes pains to infuse the solitary and introspective
act of painting
with as much testosterone as possible, a move that culminates
in an
unfortunate painting-as-sex montage set to a techno-chorale
in which
Rivera, Utrillo, Soutine and Modigliani climax simultaneously.
Deeply silly and tendentious, "Modigliani" is a sincere
attempt to
construct a myth from shopworn notions about artistic
genius that isn't
made any fresher by lines like the one the unwed teen
mother Jeanne lays on
a priest. "Forgive me father, I fell in love, is that
a sin?"
To which the priest, who must have just wandered in from
the church of
Hallmark down the street, replies, "No, my dear, the
sin would be not to
have loved at all."
Scenes like these are a disservice to the memory of a
painter as talented
and interesting as Modigliani, who unlike Picasso doesn't
have dozens of
alternate portrayals to counter the image of himself
suddenly channeling De
Niro and leaning into his father-in-law's ear to snarl,
"Grandpapa, I'll be
watching you." But what's done is done. As Jeanne's mother
says, "You can't
change destiny." I'm not sure what that means, but it
sure sounds like art.
'Modigliani'
MPAA rating: R for some language and drug use
Times guidelines: The usual famous-artist debauchery,
conventionally
romanticized
Distributed by Bauer Martinez Studios. Director Mick
Davis. Producer
Philippe Martinez, Stephanie Martinez, Andre Djaoui,
Alan Latham.
Screenplay by Mick Davis. Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes.
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/
calendar/cl-et-modigliani13may13,0,
4232638.story?coll=cl-calendar
Amedeo Modigliani was born in Leghorn (Livorno) on 12
July 1884, the fourth
child of Flaminio Modigliani and Eugénie Garsin.
Amedeo's precocious propensity to painting revealed itself
when he started
to frequent the studio of the artist Guglielmo Micheli
from Leghorn
starting from the summer of 1898.
In 1901, he left on a trip with his mother after recovering
from a
pulmonary ailment.
He discovered Naples, Amalfi, Capri, Rome and Florence.
The following
year, he enrolled at the "Scuola Libera di Nudo dell'Accademia
di Belle
Arti" in Florence where he deepened his knowledge of
Italian Impressionist
painting (also called "Macchiaiola"), the Tuscan avant-garde
artists and
their leader Professor Giovanni Fattori.
In 1903, he attended the "Scuola Libera del Nudo" in Venice.
He met the
artist Ortiz de Zŕrate with whom he discovered the Biennial
Exhibition of
Modern Art in Venice and the European artistic trends,
with a particular
attention to the works of Cézanne and Van Gogh.
During this period, he
left for England for the first time.
He arrived in Paris in early February in 1906 at the
age of 22. He died at
36.