Moss and Freud Review – Kate meets Lucien and they brilliantly deal with no funny business at all | films

When Lucian Freud meets Kate Moss, it turns out to be a meeting between a kindly, lovable old man and a warily mysterious pleasure-loving man. They both look distorted.

Freud’s Erotic Nude Portrait (2002) is a nude study of the famous fashion model, presented by his daughter, the fashion designer Bella Freud. Moss was pregnant when she sat for it, which added to the frankness and intimacy of the painting. Ellie Bamber plays Kate and executes the nude 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 has a Freud-like hawkish appearance but not quite as sharp and intense.

She was 28; He was 80 years old and his reputation as a Lothario had given rise to all sorts of tabloid gossip about a possible relationship – although the film, of which Moss serves as executive producer, is saddled with the joy-killing task of making clear that this wasn’t true, while also trying to convey some sort of redemptive eroticism elsewhere – all sorts of bohemian racism and an impossibly elegant meeting of super-creative minds. However, Moss often comes off as a hackneyed, Freudian confidant like her smug old grandfather, with whom she goes out for opium in the garden of his west London house while the two throw their heads back, laughing, of course. Their quarrels are rare and unexciting.

Of course, no film can ever live up to the painting itself: that’s where the drama and seduction really happen. There may have been a fascinating connection between Moss and Freud, or perhaps it was a practical arrangement – ​​with no spark more semi-erotic than that 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 this movie.)

This film suggests that Freud made Moss grow up and stay away from shallow partying and drugs. Well… maybe. He’s on stronger ground in hinting at the selfishness of the artist and the model – and in fact there’s a very clever scene when Freud attends Moss’s birthday party and they both hurt Bella’s (Jasmine Blackborough) feelings by almost not speaking to her. They are both fickle: Freud uses Moss, of course, and she uses him (and both were probably aware of how expensive the resulting image would be, though nothing vulgar is explicitly stated).

The crisis comes when Kate sees the final image, and quite understandably is at a loss for words. The movie is, in a way. Freud’s portrait is not like a fashion portrait, it is very different from the way she learned to see herself. It’s not entirely unattractive, there’s something relentlessly carnal and sensual about it. It excels at the film’s cautious, patrimonial style.