‘Modi - Three Days On The Wings Of Madness’: San Sebastian Review

Dir. Johnny Depp. UK/Hungary/Italy 2024. 110 mins

As a general rule, the more revered a screen actor, the shakier they are likely to be when they turn their hand to directing (not everyone is a Charles Laughton). By this measure, given the spectacular decline in his critical and personal reputation, Johnny Depp ought to stand a fair chance of redemption behind the camera. But Modi: Three Days On The Wings of Madness – a condensed slice of biopic about Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani – is a chaotically unfocused drama that feels uncomfortably like special pleading about the lonely destiny of the misunderstood artist. The film premieres in San Sebastián, one fest where, like Cannes, Depp still enjoys untarnished prestige, but it’s unlikely that this overheated dollop of agony and ecstasy will improve his stock either in the media or on the distribution circuit. 

 Stylistically, Depp seems to indulge himself however he fancies

Depp’s first directing effort, 1997’s The Brave, is remembered as a critically reviled flop – somewhat unfairly, as it had coherence, a certain grace and undeniable sincerity in its starry-eyed melancholy. By contrast, Modi’s ramshackle romanticism never remotely convinces, and – given that it’s about artists who suffered for their radical modernism – it feels terribly dated, stylistically and in content.

This English-language evocation of Modigliani’s life in Paris during World War One shows the painter as a struggling unknown, touting his work for derisory prices and doing the odd bit of sketching in cafés. We first encounter ‘Modi’ (Riccardo Sciamarcio) in one establishment, playing footsie with a society lady who is only too tickled to flirt with an arty bit of rough; then, coming to odds with the staff and snooty clientele, he exits through the stained glass window. There follows a Keystone Cops-esque chase, with baton-wielding gendarmes – one of many obtrusively mannered uses of black-and-white silent-era pastiche. 

As well as canoodling, philosophising and swapping passages of Baudelaire and Dante with his lover and model Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat, exuding lofty, husky-voiced warmth), Modi hangs out with two other unrecognised greats, Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery) and Chaim Soutine (Ryan McParland) – the Three Madcap Musketeers of Montmartre. Depp encourages the trio to overact wildly when together, especially McPartland as a wild-eyed, bug-infested Soutine, a quirkily-accented turn weirdly recalling Andy Kaufman’s Latka character. 

Outside their company, however, Sciamarcio is reasonably convincing, even if he tends to veer between matinee-idol intensity and hyperventilating angst. The film’s big actorly trump card, in theory, ought to be Al Pacino, whose appearance as collector Maurice Gangnat is constantly flagged up as a major coming attraction, but whose eventual raspy-voiced performance is a bit anticlimactic – largely because for once, the star considerably dials down his notorious hoo-hah excess. 

With two primary modes, larky and lugubrious, the film is dedicated to the late Jeff Beck, the guitar legend with whom Depp recently recorded an album – devotion to the rock ‘n’ roll spirit leaking only too obviously into this film. In the manic slapstick of its opening, Modigliani is shown as a punk rebel of his day and, throughout, hardcore Pogues fan Depp glorifies the excesses of boho lowlife in the most clichéd way imaginable – not helped by a script amply peppered with incongruities of tone. (Modi and Beatrice share a bottle of wine laced with “an ounce of hash and a shitload of mushrooms”, and quite why an Italian living in France would go for bad wordplay on ‘art’ and ‘fart’ is anyone’s guess). 

Shot in Hungary and Italy, the film is often ugly, much of it cloaked in a dusty grey pall of half-light. Some of it is downright crass: an army band drumming up recruits with martial pomp while ragged, bloody war wounded stagger past; ominous apparitions of a bird-beaked embodiment of death. Stylistically, Depp seems to indulge himself however he fancies – not least, suddenly tossing in snatches of The Velvet Underground and Tom Waits. The music, apart from that, is heavy-handed: an over-expressive smorgasbord of tango, klezmer and beer-garden oompah.

And, creakiness of execution apart, there’s surely something in dubious taste about a wealthy movie star romanticising garret-dwelling poverty, and a man who achieved adulation early in life fantasising about what it must be like to go unrecognised in your prime.