The Lovers of Montparnasse

Watch The Lovers of Montparnasse (1958) online on iFILM — Jacques Becker's biographical portrait of painter Amedeo Modigliani in his final year. Gérard Philipe plays the artist: drinking, using opium, working — all at once, in a cramped studio in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, 1919.

Modigliani falls for Jeanne Hébuterne, a young woman from a bourgeois family whose parents refuse to accept the match. No money, failing health, but the canvases keep coming. Lino Ventura plays an art dealer; Anouk Aimée appears in one of her earliest screen roles. Becker refuses to glamorize the poverty or prettify the decline — and that restraint is what keeps the film from tipping into legend.

Philipe died the following year at 36. He shot this role a few months before his own death. Stream The Lovers of Montparnasse online on iFILM.