‘Modi’: Johnny Depp’s New Film Premiere Is Absolute Madness

Natalia Winkelman

25 September 2024 at 10:41 am·5-min read

A couple hours before the premiere of Johnny Depp’s feature film, Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness at the San Sebastian Film Festival, it hit me how much of a splash Depp’s presence would really make.

By then, I’d watched Depp swagger alongside wolves in a Dior perfume ad that played on loop at the airport. I’d seen his face plastered across A1 stories in Spanish newspapers in the town center. And I’d read an interview with the director of the San Sebastian Film Festival, José Luis Rebordinos, in which he declared, “Johnny Depp for us is a festival friend,” before adding, “It’s not up to me to say if someone is an abuser.”

But it was not until I was window shopping at a denim store that I got it. Spying my festival lanyard and press badge, the twentysomething saleswoman’s eyes grew wide. “You will see the movie of Jack Sparrow?” she gushed.

Indeed, I would. Modi, a biopic of the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, marks the Pirates of the Caribbean actor’s second outing as a director. (His first was the 1997 flop The Brave.) It also marks one of Depp’s first public projects since winning a contentious and highly publicized defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard, who in a 2018 op-ed accused Depp of physical and sexual abuse. In the months and years that followed the trial, Depp was largely unemployable by major American studios. It seemed like his reputation was irrevocably marred.

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Then, in 2023, Depp emerged at the Cannes Film Festival to premiere the French costume drama Jeanne du Barry. Speaking at a press conference for the film, the actor declared, “I don’t feel boycotted by Hollywood because I don’t think about it. I don’t have much further need for Hollywood.”

But if Depp is done with Hollywood and vice versa, the international film scene is still deeply in his thrall.

At the Modi premiere last night, Depp arrived to wild applause. “Guapo!” an audience member shouted as the director took his seat in the theater. Once the movie finished, viewers—including a mother-daughter pair who excitedly told me they had attended the film twice that day—amassed in the lobby, chanting “Johnny” as they waited to catch a glimpse of him exiting.

A frenzied biopic told in whirlwind present tense, Modi is a tale of the tug-of-war between art and commerce, as told through a frenzied 72 hours in war-torn and socially stratified 1916 Paris. It begins with Modigliani (Riccardo Scamarcio), at this point an impoverished and unknown painter and sculptor, instigating a fight at a bourgeois restaurant.

Bloodied and on the lam, our hero goes on to busk on the sidewalk, carouse with artist buddies (Bruno Gouery and Ryan McParland) and join his girlfriend (Antonia Desplat) on a hashish and mushroom trip, all the while enduring a crisis of self-doubt. The film culminates in a stormy dinner between Modi and a wealthy American patron (Al Pacino) who, the struggling artist knows, has the power to make or break his career.

Pacino, Depp has said, was the reason he made the film in the first place. A pal of Depp’s (and his Donnie Brasco co-star), Pacino was once going to direct Modi, but suggested that Depp steer the ship instead. The screenplay was written by husband and wife duo Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, who previously penned the Sean Penn-directed The Pledge.

Modi is a conventional but enjoyable affair that takes as its key tenet a deep reverence for its subject. Modigliani is portrayed not only as a genius, but also a charmer with a strong moral code and magnanimous streak, apt to give away paintings for free to admiring street urchins but unwilling to sell out to the snobby collector blind to his brilliance. When, after Modi destroys a stack of his own works in a fit of demoralization, the camera lingers on the ruined compositions. If only the world had recognized Modi’s value, the shots seem to say, these masterpieces might still be intact for us to appreciate. Ain’t that life.

Naturally, the film’s villains are the critics and money men oblivious to Modi’s manifest talent, particularly his incompetent art dealer Leopold Zborowski (Stephen Graham) and Pacino’s influential collector Maurice Gangnat, whose demeanor Modi finds so offensive that, even when Gangnat comes around to offering Modi a vast sum for a sculpture, Modi refuses to sell it to him on principle. “You have merely existed, I have lived,” Modi spits at Gangnat, a line we’re meant to read as a triumphant clapback.

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You don’t have to squint to see how Depp might have seen a version of himself in Modi’s commingling of debauchery, passion and raw talent neglected by the establishment. The grand irony of all this is that Depp is scarcely a poor rogue, let alone an artist fighting for recognition. This is the famed Jack Sparrow after all, the wolfish Dior perfume ambassador and newspaper coverboy. He has a lot more in common with the Gangnats of the world than the Modis.

When asked during a San Sebastian press conference about parallels between his experience and Modigliani’s, Depp replied, “Sure, we can say that I’ve been through a number of things here and there, but I’m alright.” Seemingly referring to the legal battle with Heard, he added, “Maybe yours didn’t turn into a soap opera, televised in fact, but we all experience and go through what we go through.” In other words, all of us have merely existed. Depp has lived.