Moss & Freud (2025), dir. James Lucas
Naked Portrait 2002, Lucian Freud’s prosaically-titled painting of supermodel Kate Moss, was sold at auction 20 years ago for just under £4 million. The sale left the art world agog yet is only a postscript to the new movie Moss & Freud, starring Sir Derek Jacobi and Ellie Bamber, which had its world premiere last night at the London Film Festival.
Written and directed by James Lucas (and executive-produced by Moss herself), the film focuses not on the finished painting but on its creation, and the pair’s evolving relationship.
Considered one of the greatest figurative artists of the last century, Freud (Jacobi) was 80 when Moss (Bamber) sat for him. Or rather, reclined. On his bed. In the nude.
As the film tells it, it was her idea to take all her clothes off, a response to his desire ‘to get to the core of the being’. To her initial consternation, he required her to pose three evenings a week at his Holland Park studio ‘until it is finished’. The project took him nine months, and in that time (during which Moss found that she was pregnant) they struck up a close friendship somewhat at odds with their age gap of more than 50 years.
It’s an intriguing story but Moss & Freud doesn’t tell it especially well, never quite capturing the chemistry between the mighty artist and his beguiling subject. Jacobi is a wonderful actor, of course, in full command of his talents even at 86. And this is not even his first time depicting a great figurative painter: in Love Is The Devil (1998) he played Freud’s close friend Francis Bacon.
As for Bamber (an excellent Mandy Rice-Davies a few years back in the BBC series The Trial Of Christine Keeler), she gives the portrayal of Moss a very decent shot. For obvious reasons it’s hard to play a woman famous mainly for her extraordinary looks. Pretty though she is, Bamber doesn’t have a supermodel’s cheekbones. But that’s not the problem. The acting is convincing enough but the sizzle isn’t. I never really believed in them as the unlikely soulmates they are evidently meant to be.
Ellie Bamber (left) and Kate Moss (right) attend a screening of “Moss & Freud” during the 69th BFI London Film Festival at The Curzon Mayfair on October 10, 2025 in London
Kate Moss (left) and Ellie Bamber (right) are joined by British acting legend Derek Jacobi (centre) at the film’s premiere
Their first encounter is at the National Gallery, to which Freud has been given exclusive access. The meeting has been brokered by Moss’s close friend, Freud’s daughter Bella (Jasmine Blackborow), whose own relationship with her father is decidedly strained. Later, there’s a nice scene in a restaurant where the trio are dining, and Moss contrives an early departure so that father and daughter might bond. But he’s a difficult man, so hard to like (despite flourishes of fun such as standing on his head) that frankly it’s hard to understand why she does.
The tribulations of his past (not least fleeing Nazi Germany as a boy, and his tempestuous first marriage to the Guinness heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood, of which we see snippets in flashback) strike a chord with Moss, who has demons of her own. Understandably, she finds fame intrusive and overbearing. But too often there’s an eye-rolling artificiality to their conversation – ‘So tell me about yourself, Lucian…your grandad was Sigmund Freud?’
This is a shame, because in their different ways they are both iconic cultural figures and it’s fascinating that their paths crossed in the way they did. The film does have its virtues, and offers some compelling titbits of detail, for example that he gave her a tattoo (making Moss, as she says, perhaps the only person in the world with an original Lucian Freud on her thigh). But as a cinematic portrait of a friendship, it’s too heavy-handed by half.
Moss & Freud is showing at the BFI London Film Festival