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.

Period drama masters Merchant Ivory tackle one of Spain's most iconic artists, or rather, his love life. Francoise Gilot (Natascha McElhone) becomes eloped with the eccentric painter (Anthony Hopkins) during WW2, and the film follows the highs and lows of said relationship as she goes from wide eyed girl to lover to mother of the hot blooded artist's kids.

James Ivory's biopic of Picasso's premiere mistress does have good performances, even if the usually great Hopkins, disappointingly, never fully transforms into the legendary painter and so instead, the film ends up being carried by McElhone as a sympathetic yet ultimately frustrated and abused woman. There are also some welcome moments of humour, usually via Picasso's rather upfront comments & observations about others, and even some inventive flashback sequences that take on Picasso-esque aesthetics with very Cubist rooms and characters.

However, the screenplay never really explores why Gilot or the other women are drawn to and stay with Picasso, despite his duplicitous nature and often angry temperament. The film paints him (hah) as a genius, but also as kind of shameless and a bit of a manbaby, but the why, fame aside, is never looked at in any meaningful way. It's very much the token 'well, it happened in real life, so it's here' card of lazy biopics. Hopkins being given a two-dimensional Picasso doesn't help.

Furthermore, Picasso's art never gets much attention nor examination, missing a great opportunity for parallels and psychological exploration of our leads. This is an unbelievable blunder if you're going to even bother making a film on the man in the first place, as there's a lot of rich subtext to mine and would've helped with defining more of Picasso and his appeal.

Unless you're a Merchant ivory completionist, stick with Remains of The Day.

Pablo Picasso portrayed by the only woman to have survived his narcissistic, manipulative, patronizing and womanizing tendencies and come out of the minotaur's labyrinth, his studio, before he shatters her. A great performance of the master painter and sculptor genius by Anthony Hopkins who is a master actor himself adequately next to his young co-stars. I am a great admirer of Picasso myself and I really appreciated all the research to fit every detail in its place to make this kind of biographical film. I'm very fond of the relationship Picasso had with Henry Matisse despite their differences and the competitiveness between them.

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.

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.