Surviving Picasso

Plot

The young artist Françoise Gilot meets Picasso in Le Petit Benoit, a small bistro on the Left Bank, in Nazi-occupied Paris, and Picasso invites her and her friend to visit him at his home and studio at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins. After doing so and flirting with Picasso she decides to become a painter against her father's wishes. Françoise is beaten by her father after telling him she wants to be a painter, rather than a lawyer. Picasso encourages her to paint, and a love affair develops between them. Eventually she moves in with him, even as Picasso is shown as often not caring about other people's feelings, firing his driver after a long period of service, and as a womanizer, saying that he can sleep with whomever he wants. Despite Picasso seducing other women, quarrelling with Françoise, and behaving selfishly, the couple have two children and move to the South of France near Cannes, but problems persist. In addition to Françoise, the film depicts several of the women who were important in Picasso's life, such as Olga Khokhlova, Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Jacqueline Roque. The film ends when Françoise leaves Picasso over his coldness and his growing relationship with Jacqueline Roque, who moves in with Picasso and replaces her.

Cast

Anthony Hopkins as Pablo Picasso

Natascha McElhone as Françoise Gilot

Julianne Moore as Dora Maar

Joss Ackland as Henri Matisse

Dennis Boutsikaris as Kootz

Peter Eyre as Jaime Sabartés

Peter Gerety as Marcel

Susannah Harker as Marie-Thérèse Walter

Jane Lapotaire as Olga Khokhlova

Joseph Maher as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

Bob Peck as Françoise's Father

Joan Plowright as Françoise's Grandmother

Diane Venora as Jacqueline Roque

Dominic West as Paulo Picasso

Laura Aikman as Maya Widmaier-Picasso

Production

Development

The film's ten-year genesis was protracted because Gilot declined to be involved. In Ivory's telling, "She told us she couldn't sell us the rights to her book because her children would be upset. Otherwise, she'd do everything she could to help. We only had to ask." Things then changed after Jhabvala had worked on the script: "Françoise, who had heard a rumour that Emma Thompson was going to play her in the film and that the script wasn't what she had envisaged, began to complain. To this day, we don't know why she changed her mind." Gilot withheld the rights to her autobiography Life with Picasso, and her son Claude, who administered the Picasso estate, refused permission to show or copy any of Picasso's artwork. Ivory commented, "It was all very disappointing after the initial friendliness, but by then we simply had to go ahead and make the film." Fake Picasso paintings had to be made, and the source material used for the screenplay was Arianna Stassinopoulos's biography Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. McElhone felt that Gilot's involvement might have been counter-productive: "I would have tried to mimic all her gestures exactly."

Ivory told The Guardian that the budget had been $17 million; a Los Angeles Times article gave it as $17.2 million. In the Guardian interview, Ivory said that although Merchant-Ivory's budgets had increased since they began experiencing commercial success in the 1980s, "they are still less than half the cost of the average Hollywood film".

Filming

Location shooting took place in Paris and in the South of France; for the exterior shots of Picasso's studio, the filmmakers were able to use the actual location at rue des Grands Augustins, while the interior was recreated at Pinewood Studios. Merchant-Ivory shot the Parisian scenes while simultaneously shooting The Proprietor: the team recreated the occupation of Paris (for The Proprietor) and its liberation (for Surviving Picasso) in the Place de la Concorde on the same day.

After production had finished, Hopkins was publicly critical of Merchant-Ivory, with whom he had previously made Howards End and The Remains of the Day, telling The Los Angeles Times, "I was pretty angry at Ismail because they do spiteful things like not pay the crew. And they hold back money, to gain interest. They didn't pay me for a month... They'll take the stripes out of your socks. I'll keep my hand on my wallet next time." In response, Merchant acknowledged that one of Hopkins's payments had been held up, adding, "it is not easy to make an independent film... We have to run a tight ship... Everybody knows who we are and what we've done and how we work in films, so it's not something new as such. And each time he [Hopkins] has worked for us he has been treated like a king."

Release

After it was completed, Warner Brothers picked the film up for distribution.

The film was to have had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, but at a late stage was withdrawn, with no official reason given. Françoise Gilot, who had opposed the film's making, declared herself delighted at this, telling the media, "The jury obviously thought what I thought, that the film script was not good." Ivory later stated that the filmmakers had had to decline an invitation from the festival because it would have clashed with a celebration of their career at Carnegie Hall, and that rumours to the contrary were "pettiness and misinformation".

It was released in Britain on Boxing Day 1996.

Reception

Critical response

James Ivory paired the film with Jefferson in Paris, "which the critics fell upon with the greatest impatience and almost a kind of rage... these two films had the most dismissive reviews". On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 32% of 19 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.1/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 55 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.

Variety called McElhone "stunning", and Hopkins "a full-blooded Picasso... Hopkins paints a complex portrait of the artist, letting us see why he inspires love and devotion as well as how he indulges his selfishness and egotism". It summed up: "This is a fine return to form for Merchant Ivory after the turgid 'Jefferson in Paris,' their previous biographical outing."

Kenneth Turan, reviewing for The Los Angeles Times, thought the film a disappointment ("a genteel, well-behaved, even conventional piece of filmmaking") as also Hopkins's acting ("his work here is more surface star turn than intensely felt performance"). He did however praise strongly "McElhone’s enormous flashing eyes and... presence that practically glows" and the film's recreation of its place and time.

In a highly positive review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin thought that not using Gilot's memoir or actual Picassos became an advantage: "Freed from the slavishness of most authorized biography, the film makers try bold strokes. They use a dazzling array of elegant, spare color accents that evoke the essence of the paintings if not the particulars." As well as the visuals, Maslin lauded McElhone's "uncommonly poised screen debut" and thought that Hopkins gave "his most vital performance since The Silence of the Lambs".

Peter Travers in Rolling Stone called the film "frustratingly one-sided", summing it up as "Portrait of the Artist as a Sexist Pig". He found Jhabvala's dialogue clumsy and that Françoise's decision to withstand Picasso's abuse for a decade played as unconvincing: "Why didn't Gilot split sooner? You never learn from Surviving Picasso, which lacks the courage to show the women in Picasso's life as conspirators in their own debasement."

Roger Ebert gave 2.5 out of 4.

Box office

In the United States and Canada, Surviving Picasso grossed $2 million at the box office, against a budget of $16 million.