‘Modi – Three Days On The Wing Of Madness’ Review: Punk Rock Lives In Johnny Depp’s Riotous Celebration Of Artistic Excess – San Sebastian

deadline.com:

Johnny Depp’s bohemian fantasy Modi starts at full throttle, with the artist Amelio Modigliani (Riccardo Scamarcio) breaking up the Café Dome, then exiting on a trolley straight through their stained glass window, smashing the Art Nouveau rosebuds to bits while still clutching an ice bucket with a souvenired bottle of champagne in it.

A waiter pursues him through the smashed window, brandishing a meat cleaver. Seeing the knife, the gendarmes arrest him; Modi is home free.

As an art happening, it’s the kind of thing that is a thousand times more fun in the retelling than it would have been for the people picking glass out of their hair, let alone the ones who had to sweep up the mess afterwards.

Of course, they’re just the little people. Life as an impoverished artist wasn’t really an endless romp, either. Modi, as the film calls him, looks gleeful for the camera as he fends off an assailant with a baguette, but he was already dying by degrees; his titanic drinking and drug consumption was not so much a quest for legendary status as DIY painkilling.