Review of The Picasso Summer

This seems to start out as a women's movie. Wouldn't you love to be a beautiful woman with a rich, handsome husband who (as far as we can tell) provides you an elegant lifestyle without requiring either work or money from you? Well, not now you wouldn't, but this was still the 1960s. Today you'd have to be making some contribution to society, other than looking pretty, to justify your existence or you wouldn't be a movie heroine. But the husband is a problem too. One element driving the Bradbury story was that an economic gap kept the man from satisfying his artistic craving; it wasn't just that although he had plenty of money Picasso couldn't be bothered with him. In contrast to the hero of the story, the hero of the movie seems petty in his day-to-day dissatisfaction-- he's doing okay as an architect, but out of a big business complex he got to design no more than the warehouse. Hey, he should count his blessings. But men are that way, in chick flics. And there's pretty scenery, although not often reminiscent of Picasso. But then comes a bullfight, evidently quite unsupervised by the humane society. How many women want to see blood dripping from a dying bull's mouth and hear about how bullfighting functions as a metaphor? No wonder the movie never played in theaters. Bradbury's original ending, in which the man sees Picasso drawing in the sand with a popsicle stick, would have been a better metaphor to stress. The Bradbury man is rewarded with a special experience on the one hand, but he receives a lesson in the evanescence of all things on the other hand. When the movie was originally publicized, I thought that the real Picasso had consented to play that scene. I'm disappointed that he didn't, but the animations were impressive.