Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: James Lucas
Starring: Ellie Bamber, Derek Jacobi, Jasmine Blackborow, Tim Downie, Will Tudor
For much of the '90s and 2000s you couldn't avoid seeing the face of British supermodel Kate Moss. If she wasn't gracing the covers of fashion magazines she was disgracing her profession in the tabloids, which lapped up her little girl lost storyline. As has been the case with so many famous young women, there was a sanctimonious hypocrisy to how Moss's wild child antics were covered in the media, which acted like a concerned parent while recognising her drug-fuelled behaviour was good for business.
The public largely dismissed Moss as a ditzy airhead who didn't have a "real job." But Moss didn't simply stumble into fame. Walk down a main street in any major city and you'll see plenty of young women who are her equal in the looks department. Moss possessed what people in the fashion industry call "It!" I can't purport to know what "It" is in this regard. so perhaps it's time for a Kate Moss biopic that gets beyond the surface of her fame and makes it clear just why her industry was enamoured enough to keep patience with a highly unprofessional model.
Moss & Freud isn't that biopic. As the title suggests, it is centred on the relationship between Moss (Ellie Bamber) and the German-British artist Lucian Freud (Derek Jacobi). The two were introduced through Freud's daughter Bella (Jasmine Blackborow), who thought it would be simply spiffing if her daddy painted her bestie. The resulting portrait (nude, of course), which sold for £3.5 million in 2005, was a far cry from the image of Moss portrayed in photographs of the model. Almost grotesque, it was far from flattering, but Freud claimed it represented the "truth" of Moss.
This idea of the truth of Moss is something the film dances around. While the make-up is inconsistent (in some scenes Bamber is a double for Moss while in others she looks nothing like her), Bamber's performance is transformative. But only on a surface level. Bamber has the girly giggle and mockney affectations of the Princess of Cool Britannia (Ugh) down pat, but writer/director James Lucas never gives her anything substantial to chew on; she is as starved as Moss no doubt was before most of her shoots. The same goes for Jacobi as Freud, though as you might expect, Jacobi is much hammier than his young co-star.
For a movie about two people who lived in a world of aesthetics, Moss & Freud does an awful lot of telling rather than showing. We learn of Freud's background in a lazily written scene in which Moss tells him his own life story as though she were reading his Wikipedia page. Moss keeps telling anyone who will listen that her relationship with Freud is "too intense", and there are multiple proclamations of "I can't do this anymore." But there is little evidence of such intensity on screen. Any conflict that may have existed between artist and model has been largely sanded down, with Freud's complaints mostly centred around Moss's lack of punctuality.
This is simply the story of two people from very different generations becoming unlikely friends. Bamber and Jacobi certainly have a rapport, and it is fun to watch this young woman and old codger getting high on opium together and causing chaos in fancy restaurants. But as for the "truth" of Moss? I'm still none the wiser. And I still don't know what "It" is.
Moss & Freud is in UK cinemas from May 29th.
