MOVIE REVIEW : Unfocused ‘Modigliani’ Catches Fire Late

Gerard Philipe, the leading screen star of postwar France, is well cast in the title role of Jacques Becker’s 1958 “Modigliani--Montparnasse 19” (in revival at the Monica 4-Plex with a razor-sharp fresh print). However, not until its final third is the film itself up to Philipe’s level.

Thin and wistful-looking, Philipe was a romantic idol who was also an actor of intelligence, depth and considerable range. That Philipe died of a heart attack the following year at 36--the age at which Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian painter and sculptor who spent his career in France, himself died in 1920--gives the film an undeniable poignancy.

It needs it. Despite Philipe’s incisive portrayal, “Modigliani” tends to ramble at first in an impersonal fashion like countless other tales of starving, tormented Left Bank artists--proud, hard-drinking and unappreciated in their own lifetimes but always attracting beautiful women and a handful of anxious, self-sacrificing believers. There’s an artificial quality to the film’s atmosphere, which is heightened by its surprisingly meager attempt to evoke the Paris of 1919 and the early ‘20s; indeed, the women, and sometimes the men as well, are coiffed and even dressed in the styles of the late ‘50s.

“Modigliani” doesn’t remotely evoke its era as well as John Huston’s “Moulin Rouge” (1952) did and has none of the texture, grit and concern for detail and nuance that characterized Robert Altman’s “Vincent and Theo” and Maurice Pialat’s “Van Gogh.” That Becker, respected director of such films as the romantic period piece “Casque d’Or” (1952), which made a star of Simone Signoret, took over the film upon Max Ophuls’ sudden death, may account for the film’s initial lifelessness.

Yet it finally catches fire, achieving focus at last, thanks largely to the accumulative effects of Philipe’s unflagging concentration and understated intensity. As overwhelming despair mounts for Modigliani, Philipe suddenly becomes the painter and is no longer merely your generic tragic, self-destructive artist. We begin to feel for him and his love for the beautiful Jeanne (a highly effective Anouk Aimee), a demure-looking art student who defies her adamantly bourgeois parents to share his increasingly wretched life.

You may be surprised to discover that a film (Times-rated Mature for adult themes) about a famous painter is in black-and-white, but cinematographer Christian Matras’ exquisitely lit images are in fact “Modigliani’s” abiding glory. As the worldly, well-off British poet Beatrice Hastings, who was Modigliani’s sometime lover and patroness, Lili Palmer is showy and very actress-y. None of “Modigliani’s” drawbacks, however, diminish the impact of its truly shocking ending.

‘Modigliani--Montparnasse 19’

Gerard Philipe Amedeo Modigliani

Anouk Aimee Jeanne

Lili Palmer Beatrice

Lino Ventura Morel

An Interama release of a Franco London production. Director Jacques Becker. Producer Ralph Baum. Screenplay by Henri Jeanson. Cinematographer Christian Matras. Editor Marguerite Renoir. Costumes G. Annenkov, Jacques Heim. Set designer J. D’Eaubonne. Set decorator Anne-Marie Marchand. Sound Pierre Calvet. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for adult themes).