Surviving Picasso

As a painter, Pablo Picasso was brilliant. As a lover and husband, he could be a horror show. Picasso's relationships with women are as legendary as his work, so Surviving Picasso should, in my opinion, offer us something new -- a different perspective on the artist and his relationships. Despite the proven cinematic track record of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (A Room With a View, Howards End), Surviving Picasso is not much more than a beautiful set-piece against which an all-too-familiar story plays out with little to inspire it. Based on the controversial biography by Arianna Huffington, Surviving Picasso tells the story of Picasso's (Hopkins) 10-year relationship with aspiring painter Françoise Gilot (McElhone, making her film debut), a woman who became known more for leaving Picasso than for her own artistic work. The film is narrated by Gilot, a device that helps to flesh out some of the intricacies of their relationship and those with his first wife Olga (Lapotaire), his second wife Marie-Therese (Harker), and his “consort” Dora Maar (Moore). Meeting Picasso when she was in her early 20s, Gilot became enamored of the painter but also exhibited a strong and fairly well-defined personality. Portraying Gilot with an almost constant Cheshire-cat grin, McElhone conveys the sense of humor and strength that attracted the then sixty-something Picasso. These qualities make her subsequent relationship with the tyrannical artist problematic: How could a woman with such a defined personality and apparent sense of herself remain so transfixed? Obviously, there is more to the story, something to which Gilot's final voiceover hints when she describes how his talent and enthusiasm influenced and inspired her own work. (Now 74, the real-life Gilot has had a successful career as an artist and author.) Unfortunately, Prawer Jhabvala's script gets us no closer to the mystique of Picasso, and only a few scenes give us any sense of Gilot's development as a painter. Surviving Picasso plays as a carefully designed, beautifully presented, run-of-the-mill bio-pic, whose stellar cast is incapable of lifting the film above its rather workmanlike narrative. Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts, another member of the Merchant-Ivory team, and the entire art department do wonders with scenes such as Henri Matisse's studio and Picasso and Gilot's home. With these images we get a sense of the artists and the way they worked. Similarly, the changes in Gilot's costumes from bright, fresh dresses to muted, somber trousers and sweaters parallel the renowned representational shifts that take place in Picasso's painting as he falls out of love with a woman. Surviving Picasso presents the facts of Françoise Gilot's stormy relationship with Picasso, but the film fails to create a compelling portrait of either artist.