The Adventures of Picasso

The film tells the life of Pablo Picasso, and none of the information in it is true, deliberately. Picasso is born in Spain, his mother raises him on paint, he goes to Paris, meets Gertrude Stein, hangs around with Toulouse-Lautrec, and makes Guernica by accident. The narrator relates all of it in complete seriousness. Tage Danielsson directs. Gösta Ekman plays Picasso. The screenplay is by Danielsson and Hasse Alfredson, a well known Swedish comedy partnership that worked together for years. The method is fake biography. The film takes the shape of an artist's life and fills it with entirely invented events; the humour comes from the gap between the seriousness and the nonsense. There is almost no dialogue. The characters speak meaningless sentences in their own languages and the narrator pretends to translate, which connects the film directly to the tradition of silent comedy. It is a cult film in Sweden and its lines stayed in circulation; for a viewer who knows art history the density of references is very high. In some passages real paintings are staged as tableaux and the pictures themselves become part of the joke. Who it is for: viewers who like absurd Swedish comedy and films that play with art history. Who it is not for: the humour runs a very particular vein, the narrative is made of episodes, and most of the jokes are lost without the references.