Surviving Picasso

Surviving Picasso (1996) is a Merchant-Ivory biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by James Ivory with Anthony Hopkins as Pablo Picasso.

The story belongs less to the painter than to Françoise Gilot, the young artist who became his lover in occupied Paris and the one woman who managed to walk away with herself intact. Hopkins makes the genius a charming tyrant, as greedy for devotion as he is for the canvas, scorching everyone within reach. Natascha McElhone gives Gilot a quiet stubbornness, with Julianne Moore and Joan Plowright filling out the circle around them.

This is unhurried, character-first period filmmaking, more interested in temperament than scandal. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the script, drawing on Gilot's own memoir. Stream Surviving Picasso online on iFILM.