Riccardo Scamarcio as the artist Amadeo Modigliani [Modi Productions Ltd]

MODI: THREE DAYS ON THE WING OF MADNESS
Directed by Johnny Depp
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆

THREE days of toddling about Paris, befuddled by booze and drugs, trying to avoid your enemies and annoying your friends: this Johnny Depp-directed biopic of the artist Amedeo Modigliani feels a little like you’ve been invited to join the filmstar on a weekend bender. The end results are possibly as painful.

The cult of the tortured artist runs through this tale of the amazing Modigliani. Depp has form in terms of worshipping those who have a wild life alongside their art: think Hunter S Thompson or Charles Bukowski, and how boozing and uncouth behaviour has become interlinked with success.

We are taken to Paris during the Great War: Modi (Riccardo Scamarcio) moved from Livorno, Italy, and became one of those Left Bank creatives who moved in exalted circles.

Modi’s life would be racked by ill health and addiction, coupled with a wonderful talent. Depp attempts to bring this to life as we follow him as he embarks on crazy drinking, smoking, and tripping out on whatever he could lay his hands on.

Depp’s direction creates big set-piece speeches in every scene, which takes away any pretence of naturalism. In an early warning of what you are about to see, Modigliani insults an army captain and then prances about like he’s been asked to play a game of charades and is trying to mime Jack Sparrow of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Modi wobbles from one set piece where lines are shouted out in cod-French accents to the next, each designed to hammer into the viewers’ heads that people who drink booze and smoke cannabis to excess are very cool and very creative.

Modi interacts with art dealer Zborowski (Stephen Graham) and takes liberties with his lover, the semi-sensible English woman in Paris, Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat). Hastings tries to manage this manchild as best she can, but comes over as something of a lost soul, too. What attracts her to this smelly bad boy is quite a mystery, as we aren’t given much of a view of why Modi has become a key figure in early 20th-century art movements.

Modigliani’s work is wonderful, more of a shame then that we don’t learn much about where his inspiration came from.