The supermodel comes across as a dippy trustafarian and the artist like her soppy old grandpa in this bland, legacy-protecting depiction of their friendship
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.
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The supermodel comes across as a dippy trustafarian and the artist like her soppy old grandpa in this bland, legacy-protecting depiction of their friendshipWhen Lucian Freud met Kate Moss turns out to be the encounter...
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