Kevin Macdonald gives his subject enough rope in this slippery documentary about how we project a sense of regret.
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).
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.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
Published 8 Mar 2024
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