Surviving Picasso

Surviving Picasso is a 1996 American biographical drama film directed by James Ivory and starring Anthony Hopkins as the famous painter Pablo Picasso. It was produced by Ismail Merchant and David L. Wolper. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay was loosely based on the 1988 biography Picasso: Creator and Destroyer by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. Plot The young Françoise meets Picasso in Nazi-occupied Paris, where Picasso is complaining that people broke into his house and stole his linen, rather than his paintings. It shows Françoise being beaten by her father after telling him she wants to be a painter, rather than a lawyer. Picasso is shown as often not caring about other people's feelings, firing his driver after a long period of service, and as a womanizer, saying that he can sleep with whomever he wants. The film is seen through the eyes of his lover Françoise Gilot. As the producers were unable to get permission to show the works of Picasso in the film, the film is more about Picasso's personal life rather than his works, and where it does show paintings, they are not his more famous works. When Picasso is shown painting Guernica, the camera sits high above the painting, with the work only slightly visible. The film depicts several of the women who were important in Picasso's life, such as Olga Khokhlova, Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Jacqueline Roque.