Ian Bonhôte, Peter Ettedgui (2018)
Costumes, along with disorienting lighting and sound effects, naturally dominated the Alexander McQueen exhibition ‘Savage Beauty’ but a less conspicuous element made an impression on me when Sally and I saw the show at the V&A in 2015. The contents of each room were introduced by text explaining, in the designer’s own words, a particular collection’s inspiration and meaning. As his fame increased, so, it seemed, did McQueen’s appetite for grand statements about the state of the world and the meaning of life. These repeatedly caught my attention and increasingly got on my nerves. It wasn’t only that I wanted McQueen’s work to speak for itself: after a while, the creator’s windy, occasionally contradictory words of wisdom got in the way of his creations. The experience left me apprehensive about watching McQueen but I needn’t have worried. Ian Bonhôte’s and Peter Ettedgui’s documentary about the short, ardent life of Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) is skilfully engaging.
The directors, not unexpectedly, use plenty of footage of interviews with their subject to tell his story but this includes only a few high-sounding pronouncements – which, like everything else McQueen has to say in the film, are grounded, as the captions at the V&A couldn’t be, in his singular East Ender persona. Bonhôte and Ettedgui build a portrait of someone who was both an artist and, from his apprenticeship at a firm of tailors in Savile Row onwards, a grafter. McQueen’s innate technical abilities were remarkable. He knew a client’s measurements on sight and had a facility for instantly translating ideas into visual reality. He also worked excessively hard. The rate at which he developed shows, on the evidence of this documentary, is astonishing – especially in the late 1990s when he divided his time and effort between London and his Givenchy appointment in Paris. I don’t recall getting from any other cinema or television account of the fashion world such a strong impression of a couturier’s work being intended for exhibition appraisal rather than potential practical use. McQueen outfits express their designer’s psyche no less than paintings hanging in an art gallery do.
Packed into the 111-minute onslaught of Bonhôte’s and Ettedgui’s film, the darkness of McQueen’s inner life and imagination, although reflected in a series of repeatedly unconventional shows, develops a pattern. This may not be so for audiences who didn’t see ‘Savage Beauty’ but his ‘theatrical staging of cruelty’, as one critic described it in 2004, begins to verge on a trademark. And the rags-to-riches-price-of-fame trajectory is inevitably familiar from other show business biographies (it seems reasonable to describe his business as show business). This turns out not to matter. The originality of his designs and the strength of his personality are enough to make McQueen’s life story thoroughly individual – even if this viewer’s weird memory for dates meant I was bound to notice that he hanged himself on 11 February. It was the anniversary of another well-known suicide, Sylvia Plath’s, forty-seven years earlier.
McQueen had suffered from anxiety and depression for some time. According to the film, the recent death of his mother was what pushed him into bringing about his own. He killed himself on the eve of his mother’s funeral. The rest of his family, of course, had to see that funeral through as well as start arranging McQueen’s own and cope with the shock of his death. His elder sister and her son, both interviewed by Bonhôte and Ettedgui, show no trace of bitterness about this, only loving regret. The mixture of talking heads in McQueen illustrates effectively the cultural split between the protagonist’s background and his professional world. The nephew, Gary James McQueen, supplies something of a bridge between the two: he worked with his uncle and is now a designer in his own right. The film moves at a fast pace that conveys the relentless nature of Alexander McQueen’s creativity and drivenness. The Michael Nyman soundtrack helps with this too. A collaborator with McQueen, Nyman has written original music for the film; Bonhôte and Ettedgui also use parts of his scores for other movies. It’s always a shame to be reminded of Peter Greenaway but at least Nyman’s compositions for him are now, belatedly, being put to better use.
9 November 2018
