Surviving Picasso

I saw this film initially in 1996. I remember having to work in the morning and had a few hours to kill in the afternoon. I decided to give it a try, because it starred Anthony Hopkins and I'm a fan. Being a Merchant Ivory film I thought it was going to be boring. It wasn't. It held my interest until the ending credits. I sat amazed when it was finished....just processing what I had just witnessed.

Pablo Picasso has to be one of the most complex of human beings ever. Surviving Picasso chronicles his love affair with Françoise Gilot. He spent from 1944 to 1953 with her, and fathered two of her children, but wouldn't marry her. Gilot is realistically played by Natascha McElhone. We get to see how difficult Picasso was to live with. Anthony Hopkins plays an emotionally weak, yet tyrannical genius. Literally, holding this young woman hostage. He was the father of her children, but never gave her any monetary compensation to raise those kids. She had to depend upon the kindness of her grandmother.

Of all of his women, we start to see that she alone understood his weaknesses. I got the impression that out of all of the women he was involved with, she probably loved him the most. He knew this and used this to hold her his emotional prisoner.

Surviving Picasso is not an easy film to sit through. You begin to hate Picasso for manipulating everyone he comes in contact with. My thought was that he was a spoiled child that never grew up. He relished when his women fought over him, pined over him, and even did desperate things to show him how much they loved him. Yet, he didn't seem to appreciate any of their efforts.

I was totally drawn into this film and think one needs to give it a chance. It's a thinking person's film. The character development is complex, but you begin to have sympathy for the victims of this madman.

I liked this movie quite a bit. It is not a very flattering portrait of the master, but it gives one insight into his art. Anthony Hopkins gives a convincing portrayal of the bad and the good qualities of the man. He had a charming playfulness about him which the women in his life fell for despite themselves and the knowledge of his reputation. Of course, his dark side was his maniacal desire for control of his women's lives, even after the romantic sides of their relationship had long since died. My question about those women is why they went out of their way to get into a relationship with him, knowing he had already ruined the lives of others. Francoise, the main character, thought herself strong enough to stave off any emotional harm he could do her, but when you get into a romantic relationship with someone, your reason disappears. Nobody's strong enough to not be hurt by someone they are emotionally involved with. The trick is to meet only the people who you feel reasonably sure will not do you harm. One would think an intelligent woman like Francoise would know that. If this were a piece of fiction, I would find it hard to believe, but given that the movie is based on fact.... This knowledge added a great deal to the intrigue of the movie, and a great deal of depth to the characters.

The acting is first-rate. I've seen a few of the other movies in which Natascha McElHone has acted, but those parts were not large enough to show her range. I was extremely impressed. She has a very expressive face, capable of portraying an entire pallet of emotions, and, most importantly, she is obviously an intelligent woman, capable of convincingly playing an intellectual. Of course, the fact that she is elegantly drop-dead gorgeous has not colored my emotions about her performance one bit.

Hopkins as usual does a brilliant job. I have never seen him express ebullience as he does here. He does a good job of showing how charming Picasso could be, supplying some motivation for why women fell for him, knowing his infamous past.

Seeing this movie lent new meaning to some of his paintings which I have seen recently. There is a portrait of Dorra Marr (sp?) in the Belissario Hotel in Las Vegas. One half of it portrays a happy woman, the other half is tinged with sadness. I now know the story behind this painting, making it all the more memorable. Like the first reviewer, I'm not a big fan of Picasso, but knowing what lies behind some of his paintings will add interest in the future.

It's a pity that many of the user comments on this movie are simply a vehicle for people's dislike of Picasso, and that they treat the film as though it were a documentary. Picasso may have been as sex-mad, egocentric, paranoid and capricious as any Hollywood star (think Chaplin); but first and foremost he was a prodigious artist, who transformed our view of visual art, and dealt with some of the great themes of western culture. And presumably it was those latter qualities which drew women to him, in the same way that women have been drawn to successful, powerful men of dubious character since the dawn of time.

The movie and Hopkins' performance are certainly successful in displaying Picasso's human weaknesses; but there is a failure to adequately convey Picasso's enormous creative power, a weakness compounded by the fact that the makers were not allowed to use much of his work in the film. I see the film as a well made, excellently acted, but partial (in both senses of the word) portrait of the artist. Its real focus is the women in his life, especially Francoise Gilot, and on the two-way exploitative nature of the relationship between a man of this kind and his mistresses/wives.

Anthony Hopkins is a very gifted actor,nobody can deny,but ,he was beginning to do any job going:playing Hannibal,Nixon and Picasso,it's much ,too much !Besides,James Ivory 's majestic talent ("Howards end" "remains of the day" "A room with the view" "Maurice") had inexorably waned."Jefferson in Paris" was already unsatisfying,smug and overblown.Still,it was entertaining."Surviving Picasso' is not.Only five minutes -let's be generous- are given over to the process of creation.The essential revolves around Picasso's relationship with women;this is neither rewarding nor entertaining,being trite,hollow and devoid of emotion , violence or/and tenderness.

Word to the wise:people interested in Picasso's art -which is more interesting than his private life!who cares?- should try to see Henri-Georges Clouzot 's "le mystère Picasso" (1956):Unlike Ivory,Clouzot films the REAL Picasso while he is creating.He paints on a sheet of glass and we can follow every lick of paint.

As far as context goes, I had already known most of the material from biographies in other sources. There were only a couple new aspects to this one. The acting was superb. Anthony Hopkins and Natascha McElhone were passionate and believable. It portrays Picasso's nature as narrated by one of his former lovers. It's NOT a fluff piece, but you shouldn't end up hating him unless you did already.