McQueen

It is a touch­ing trib­ute that com­pos­er Michael Nyman scored McQueen, a new doc­u­men­tary about the cel­e­brat­ed and sore­ly missed British fash­ion design­er, as he loved to lis­ten to Nyman’s orches­tra­tions when work­ing in his atelier.

The film itself fol­lows that taste for sym­phonies: in under two hours, direc­tors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui (the lat­ter wrote the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed Bran­do doc Lis­ten to Me Mar­lon) speed through the blis­ter­ing life and art of their sub­ject. Even if they occa­sion­al­ly verge on indul­gence, their relent­less film­mak­ing most­ly suc­ceeds at evok­ing Alexan­der McQueen’s pas­sion, dis­arm­ing gen­eros­i­ty and even­tu­al heart-wrench­ing down­ward spiralling.

McQueen’s extrav­a­gance isn’t a secret: ​“I pull these hor­rors out of my soul and put them on the cat­walk,” he tells a group of jour­nal­ists. By focussing on the man, Bonhôte and Ettedgui aim to bet­ter under­stand the leg­end, pro­vid­ing a frame of ref­er­ence for those icon­i­cal­ly hor­ri­fy­ing and beau­ti­ful out­fits. Many of McQueen’s clos­est friends/​collaborators (fash­ion real­ly was his whole life) give can­did inter­views to the cam­era, detail­ing how fas­ci­nat­ing­ly bizarre and kind he was.

Return­ing fre­quent­ly through­out the film to dis­cuss the evo­lu­tion of their rela­tion­ships with the design­er, these friends are also giv­en a lot of space for their own per­son­al­i­ties to shine through. Instead of turn­ing its sub­ject into a god-like elu­sive being (which post-mortem artist doc­u­men­taries are always at a risk of doing), the direc­tors high­light McQueen’s human­i­ty, fram­ing those around him as being essen­tial to build­ing his identity.

An impres­sive amount of tele­vi­sion and home movie footage from the time allows us see McQueen speak in his own words and behave nat­u­ral­ly. Aged only 23 when his MA show at the pres­ti­gious Cen­tral St Martin’s Col­lege of Art and Design put him on the map, the South Lon­don-born, work­ing-class design­er had a child­ish­ness and punk spir­it that also came through in his work.

This sym­bio­sis between his jubi­lant per­son­al­i­ty and his out­ra­geous cre­ations explains his ver­tig­i­nous rise to cult sta­tus, and the film reach­es emo­tion­al highs when it rev­els in this mag­i­cal for­mu­la: when McQueen watch­es robot­ic arms spray-paint a DIY dress for the splen­did finale of his 1999 spring/​summer show No. 13, his tears are also ours for they are so clear­ly the direct prod­uct of his eccen­tric mind and per­son­al history.

McQueen most­ly avoids didac­tic con­junc­tions between the designer’s life and work. The film’s struc­ture into chap­ters, how­ev­er, harms its oth­er­wise unre­strained embrac­ing of his com­plex­i­ty. Tacky CGI title cards show skulls cov­ered with bloom­ing then crum­bling flow­ers which rep­re­sent McQueen’s rise and fall, and delin­eate peri­ods in his life. On top of slow­ing down the exhil­a­rat­ing rhythm of such a full exis­tence, this cheap nar­ra­tive device is distasteful.

McQueen had every right to com­pose his own depar­ture as he pleased (he became obsessed with skulls in his lat­er shows and fan­ta­sised about tak­ing his own life on the cat­walk). When Bonhôte and Ettedgui do so, and after the fact, they pro­vide too neat a con­clu­sion for a life so ill-suit­ed to com­fort­able boundaries.