Armie Hammer plays gay again in his follow-up to Call Me By Your Name.
In Final Portrait, Hammer plays writer and art lover James Lord, who as a 22-year-old officer in the U.S. Army intelligence service, befriended figures of the postwar French literary and artistic elite after arriving in Paris on a three-day pass.
Final Portrait deals with his friendship with artist and sculptor Alberto Giacometti, and Giacometti’s attempts to capture Lord’s portrait.
What isn’t captured in the film’s trailer are other aspects of Lord’s personality, as told by The Telegraph in Lord’s obituary in 2009:
On his return to Paris in 1947, having left his American university without a degree, Lord resumed his acquaintance with Picasso. Although he had ambitions to become a novelist, Lord devoted most of his time and energy to his boyfriends, throwing and attending parties, buying paintings, travelling in Europe and befriending artists, aristocrats, flamboyant dealers, unscrupulous collectors and various shady types from the Parisian demi-monde.
For most of his life he kept a daily journal, written up at the end of each day in “a fat, black oilcloth notebook”. In it he carefully recorded (often verbatim) conversations with the clever, glamorous, talented and often indiscreet people with whom he mixed.
“My friends say I am secretive and devious,” he wrote in the preface to Picasso and Dora. “They are right.”
Final Portrait opens on March 23 in New York and L.A..
