Anticipation.
Another week, another fawning profile documentary?
Enjoyment.
Feels like it initially, but swerves into more fascinating and uncomfortable terrain.
In Retrospect.
Portrait of an artist as a seriously flawed man.
For those celebrities that may have accidentally besmirched their image in the public eye, a juicy profile documentary seems like the perfect vehicle for rehabilitation. But when you pair up with a filmmaker who prizes journalistic instinct and integrity over the dark arts of public relations, then there’s a chance that things can go from bad to worse. The flamboyant, fallen fashion designer John Galliano experiences a bit of both at the hands of old hand Kevin Macdonald in this detailed portrait of a man whose pleas for forgiveness are laced with a bitter insincerity that the director emphasises rather than hides.
The film opens on grainy smartphone footage of a drunken Galliano sat outside a Parisian café and insulting his fellow patrons with vile Nazi-inflected slurs. The film then flashes back through a career in which his talent, vision and creativity were lauded with blank cheque fashion extravaganzas and top jobs at some of Europe’s biggest fashion houses (Givenchy and Dior).
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Then, circumstances conspire, anxieties and addictions come to a sorry head, and all is lost in a moment’s lapse of taste. While the film extends a certain empathy towards its subject’s mighty fall from grace, it does not let him off the hook, and it ends as a multi-dimensional study of a man who has lived a life of such extreme entitlement that sincere contrition simply does not compute with him.
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