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128 MINUTES | MFA: NOVEMBER 3, 5, 10-12, 17, 19-20, 25, 27 "Do you know what love is?" That’s Jeanne Hébuterne’s challenge to us at the outset of Mick Davis’s bogus bio-pic of Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian Jewish artist whose bohemian antics and elongated nudes lit up the City of Light in the second decade of the 20th century. And that’s about how deep the script runs; later, when Picasso asks, "Why do you hate me so much?", our hero answers, "I love you, Pablo. It’s myself I hate." The year is 1919, and the bogus plot has Modigliani (a hip, smirking Andy Garcia) challenging Picasso (Omid Djalili, looking and acting more like Diego Rivera) in the annual art competition even as he and Jeanne (a stranded Elsa Zylberstein) try to get their daughter back from her Catholic father. It all climaxes with Chaim Soutine, Maurice Utrillo, Gertrude Stein, and even Picasso applauding Modigliani’s bogus entry (we never see a real painting) at the Salon des Artistes while he’s out in the snow getting beaten to death (in fact he died of tuberculosis and substance abuse) for not paying his absinthe tab, just another artistic sacrifice to life’s ironies, cruelties, and bad filmmakers.
BY JEFFREY GANTZ
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