Final portrait

Movie
German title	Final portrait
Original title	Final portrait
Country of production	United Kingdom
original language	English , ; French , ; Italian
Publishing year	2017
length	94 minutes
Age rating	FSK 0
Rod
Director	Stanley Tucci
script	Stanley Tucci
production	Nik Bower , ; Gail Egan , ; Ilann Girard
camera	Danny Cohen
cut	Camilla Toniolo
occupation
	Geoffrey Rush : Alberto Giacometti ; Armie Hammer : James Lord ; Clémence Poésy : Caroline; Tony Shalhoub : Diego Giacometti ; James Faulkner : Pierre Matisse ; Philippe Spall : Pimp; Sylvie Testud : Annette Arm ;

Final Portrait is a British film biography by Stanley Tucci about the Swiss sculptor, painter and graphic artist Alberto Giacometti , which celebrated its world premiere on February 11, 2017 at the Berlin International Film Festival and was released in German cinemas on August 3, 2017.

action

1964 in Paris. The bizarre and crazy Swiss artist genius Alberto Giacometti is one of the most important painters and sculptors in Europe, and his works achieve record sales. When he asks the young writer and art lover James Lord , who is a good friend of his, whether he would like to sit as a model for his next portrait, the latter is flattered. However, the model sitting in his Paris studio, which is actually designed for an afternoon, takes much longer than he expected, because sometimes Giacometti's creative process is completely chaotic and irritating. The creation of the picture takes 18 days, because Giacometti repeatedly undoes his work, paints over finished parts of the painting or starts over.

Giacometti prefers to do other things, for example with his lover Caroline or his wife Annette, who often argue, but also by visiting a bistro to sip a red wine and going for walks. Other times the artist is just not in the mood to sit at the easel. James has to postpone his flight home several times, and Giacometti's extraordinary methods almost drive him mad. One who knows his quirks is Alberto's brother Diego, who is also an artist.

Biographical and literary background


Geoffrey Rush , here at the premiere of Final Portrait at the Berlinale 2017 , plays the painter Alberto Giacometti in the film

Alberto Giacometti was a sculptor, painter and printmaker. Born in Switzerland, he is regarded as the most important sculptor of the 20th century and was already worshiped during his lifetime. Alberto Giacometti spent most of his artistic life in Paris in his legendary studio on Rue Hippolyte-Maindron. He lived and worked here, but always returned to his native Bergell. He met Annette Arm , who would later become his wife, in Geneva, where he stayed from 1942 to 1945. However, Giacometti never ceased to desire other women. So the prostitute Caroline went in and out of the studio, and his wife accepted her fate. In Giacometti's last years, Caroline remained his muse and lover.

“The entire career of modern artists lies in this will to seize something, to own something that is constantly evading [...] It is as if reality were always behind the veils that tear. There is still another reality, still another ”, Giacometti once said, referring to his own artistic work, because he was obsessed with the impossibility of declaring a work to be“ completed ”and therefore repeatedly modified pictures or sculptures , even at the price of discarding a completely finished work. Alberto Giacometti died in 1966.

James Lord , who had met him, wrote a biography about the artist called "A Giacometti Portrait".

production

Rod

Director Stanley Tucci at the Berlinale 2017

Armie Hammer plays James Lord in the movie

Directed by Stanley Tucci . His script is based on the biography of James Lord. This had fascinated the director: “At some point I found this book and thought it was the most beautiful book about the creative process that I have ever read. I carried it around with me for a long time, read it again and again because it is so inspiring. Then I asked myself if I could make a film out of it. ”It took ten years before he put his plan into practice. At a press conference, Tucci said that if it had been up to him he would have shot Final Portrait in black and white, but the producers would not have allowed him to do so, the risk of a commercial flop was too high.

About the artist he portrayed, Tucci says: “He did everything completely openly. His pictures are very graceful, but Giacometti as a person was not exactly tactful, but he lived exactly the life that he wanted to live - without compromise - and these are two difficult things for each of us. ”The director comments on Giacometti's love life even if he loved his wife and she loved him, for some reason she had made this sacrifice.

Casting, dubbing and filming

Geoffrey Rush took on the role of the painter Alberto Giacometti , Armie Hammer played his model and later biographer James Lord . The role of Giacometti's wife Annette Arm was cast with Sylvie Testud . Clémence Poésy took on the role of Giacometti's lover Caroline, Tony Shalhoub plays Giacometti's brother Diego , James Faulkner plays the art dealer Pierre Matisse , son of the impressionist Henri Matisse , and Philippe Spall can be seen in the role of Pimp.

Wolfgang Condrus speaks in the German dubbed version Alberto Giacometti , Sabine Falkenberg can be heard as his wife Annette, Tatjana Pokorny in the role of his lover Caroline, and Sascha Rotermund speaks his model James Lord. Olivier Thomazo lends his voice to the art dealer Pierre Matisse.

The shooting took place in London, in Ruby's Bar & Lounge at 76 Stoke Newington Road, where the scene was shot in the French restaurant. Another location was on Bermondsey Street, where exterior shots were taken. The dusty, untidy and cramped Parisian studio and the art that was there at the time, Tucci had young artists faithfully reproduce.

Marketing and Publishing

The film celebrated its world premiere on February 11, 2017 at the Berlin International Film Festival . The film will be presented at the Edinburgh International Film Festival from June 25, 2017 . A first trailer for the film was published in early July 2017. The film was released in German cinemas on August 3, 2017. From March 9, 2018, the film was shown at the South by Southwest Film Festival .

reception

Reviews

In the film, Stanley Tucci reflects on the artistic creation process by showing the viewer it from the perspective of Alberto Giacometti . In the film he asks when a work of art is actually finished, whether it can ever be finished. Conversely, he also shows the perspective of his model and its influence on this process.

Ula Brunner from RBB Online says about the film: “The encounters between the two dissimilar personalities, in which Tucci comprehends Giacometti's artistic perception with many close-ups, has a lot of comic potential. Especially since Geoffrey Rush the role of the grumpy and weird Giacometti is tailor-made, even the physiognomy of the original and the actor is similar. And Armie Hammer manages to look wonderfully like a Harvard graduate who himself cannot understand that he ended up in the dusty Parisian backyard. "

Barbara Block from Das Erste says that Tucci manages to get close to the eccentric artist, but also to the desperate person Alberto Giacometti, in a playful and easy way, and that it is a wonderful and ingenious film about the great eternal doubter.

Peter Angerer of the Tiroler Tageszeitung says that, as in all of his directorial work, Tucci also meets his protagonists in Final Portrait with ironic distance, and his approach to Giacometti is more of a farce than a biopic : “The artist takes his biographer as a prisoner, makes him a witness of escapades and its ambivalent character. As Giacometti's brother Diego, Tony Shalhoub admonishes in virtuoso Monk manner to be careful when dealing with the artist and after the third session we can no longer escape this fascination, which also has to do with Geoffrey Rush. "

Bert Rebhandl judges the film in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung much more critically : “Final Portrait [shows] a Giacometti who gets excited about the“ thief ”Picasso, but in a film in which he himself becomes precariously interchangeable. [...] The things (and figures) show no other "face" here than that of a conventional period picture , which a genius in danger believes has been sufficiently interpreted when the plaster crumbles from the walls. "