‘Moss & Freud’ review: Dramatisation of the 2002 collaboration between Lucian Freud and Kate Moss

Dir. James Lucas. UK/New Zealand. 2025. 100mins

Two demi-mondes meet in Moss & Freud: the turn-of-millennium club-glam scene of mannequin Kate Moss, and the older inventive London embodied by revered painter Lucian Freud. Their level of conjuncture was Freud’s nude rendition of Moss, Bare Portrait 2002, for which James Lucas’s characteristic, which premieres within the BFI London Movie Competition, might be thought of a fictionalised making-of. However the movie registers as extra two-dimensional than the canvas.

Extra two-dimensional than the canvas

A fond, considerably cosy evocation of an unlikely collaboration turned emotional kinship, it’s oddly nostalgic in its glamourised if rueful depiction of a really current period, finally coming throughout as a handsomely mounted however mundane celeb anecdote. Enjoying reverse a considerably below-par Derek Jacobi, Ellie Bamber offers issues an enthusiastic increase as a younger, mercurial Moss – however not fairly sufficient to present this slight quantity greater than superficial celeb-saga attraction.

James Lucas, beforehand generally known as author on 2013 Oscar-winning quick The Telephone Name, makes an uneasy characteristic directing debut right here, his script particularly awkward when attempting to articulate Moss’s soul-searching. As a director, although, he does give ostensibly unpromising chamber-drama materials a assured varnish of metropolitan swagger, and he works nicely with Bamber to extract nuance from what may in any other case have been a wafer-thin falling-angel position. 

Bamber’s Moss is first seen in her 90s heyday, ecstatically, erratically rushing alongside in her sports activities automotive. She’s quickly seen thrill-seeking in Berlin, however even she will be able to’t get into an unique nightclub – presumably the notoriously bleeding-edge Berghain – as a result of it’s S&M night time. She resolves this by striding in half-naked together with her chauffeur in his lingerie as her ‘pet’ (on condition that he’s black, an unlucky lapse into informal racism on the movie’s half).

More and more world-weary, Moss agrees to be painted by Freud (Jacobi), father of her fashionista pal Bella (a vigorous, louchely patrician Jasmin Blackborow). She hasn’t fairly reckoned with how rigorous Lucian’s work routine is – or along with his imperious dangerous mood. However she quickly realises that the sittings in his studio are her royal street to self-discovery and decides to pose nude, declaring, “I don’t need to cover any extra.”

A testy Freud equally begins to disclose extra of himself, not least when the pair bond in an opium session – with Jacobi’s accent disconcertingly shifting from Kensington posh to a robust streak of German guttural (the painter was born in Berlin). Black-and-white flashbacks recall Freud’s youthful courtship of his second spouse, aristo and author Caroline Blackwood. In the meantime an interview for Dazed and Confused  turns into an prolonged flirting session with smoothie editor Jefferson Hack (Will Tudor).

Jefferson asks Moss whether or not she sees herself as an artist or a muse (“Good query,” she replies. “Each actually”) – and the movie, for which Moss serves as govt producer, very insistently coaxes us into accepting the artist argument. The slowly creating canvas turns into the battleground for 2 intense – and intensely self-focused – souls, the painted outcome introduced as a co-authored document of their emotional fight. As a variant on artwork historical past’s entrenched tortured-genius-meets-naked-lady mythology, Moss & Freud is considerably totally different in that right here the mannequin is manifestly extra tortured than the painter. However as a severe contemplation on the thorny query of model-artist dynamics, the movie is nothing on Jacques Rivette’s 1991 in-depth research La Belle Noiseuse. 

Bamber maybe overstresses the self-conscious jaded of Moss as too-much-too-soon megastar, however her efficiency comes into her personal as soon as her maturing Kate lets the doubts and vulnerabilities present, together with a sharper streak of self-aware humour. Jacobi, nonetheless, falls considerably wanting his storied finest in his depiction of Freud as a dog-eared grandee with added angst. His efficiency inescapably raises reminiscences of his extra whole-heartedly incisive efficiency as Freud’s modern Francis Bacon in John Maybury’s 1998 Love Is the Satan – a movie that revelled in its demi-monde roughness, the place this one by no means transcends gossip and gloss.