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Unmade movies never die. Last year, the world finally saw Megalopolis, the grand passion project Francis Ford Coppola had been trying to bring to life since the late 1970s. At that same distant point, his lead in The Godfather, Al Pacino, first planned a film about modernist painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani. Coppola was even approached to direct, though by the 1990s, Pacino himself was to take the job, with Johnny Depp to star.
Now, almost half a century after the original pitch, Modì, Three Days on the Wing of Madness has gone before the camera. In the end, Depp directs and Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio plays Modigliani. Pacino is still involved. Hold that thought.
Unsurprisingly, the film feels as if a thick coat of dust has just been blown off it. 1916 Paris is bedevilled by the gifted, wildly unsuccessful rogue Modì. A tone-setting opening brings slapstick mayhem and outraged café society. Much drunken boorishness follows. “You don’t like authority, do you, Monsieur Modigliani?” a minor character scowls. We are meant to cheer in admiration, though the high jinks get so repetitive, even an anarchist might call for a gendarme.
Still, the movie has a thesis, or at least an opinion. More than mere pickled livers, it wants to celebrate the bloody-minded artistic independence this version of Modigliani embodies. Depp seems to know the film will be easy to mock: Scamarcio has charisma, but is encouraged into some very broad acting. And yet Modì also has a built-in get-out clause. Nobody knows anything, and really, the only judge is time. At this point, after all, Modigliani, had never sold a picture. (Fittingly, The Velvet Underground appear on the soundtrack. In 1960s New York, they sold next to no records.)
And then there is Pacino. The actor arrives late in the movie, wheeled on like a dessert trolley to play art collector Maurice Gangnat. What accent he is using is beyond me, but he uses it with vim. “You gotta be kidding me!” he exclaims, as only a French industrialist in 1916 could. The moment is priceless — but like the rest of the movie, it is nothing if not its own choice.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from July 11
