Iris review – vibrant sartorial documentary
4 / 5 stars
Iris Apfel, the
beloved 93-year-old New York fashion icon, is a fitting subject for
Albert Maysles’s penultimate film
Jonathan Romney
Sunday 2 August 2015
07.59 BST /
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/02/iris-review-vibrant-sartorial-documentary
Edna Mode, the
hi-tech fashionista of The Incredibles, may have had Anna Wintour’s
hair, but more distinctively, she had the porthole-sized spectacles
of Iris Apfel, the 93-year-old subject of this documentary. A beloved
New York fashion icon and self-styled “geriatric starlet”, Mrs
Apfel is famous for dressing with delirious, eye-searing panache. “I
like to improvise,” she says, “try this, try that, as though I’m
playing jazz” – her jazz presumably being of the bacchanalian
free-improv variety, rather than black polo-neck cool school.
Albert Maysles’s
film follows Apfel on her shopping expeditions; explores the
clutter-filled Aladdin’s cave of a home she shares with her husband
and interior-design partner Carl, now 101; and shows her imparting
brittle and generous wisdom to younger and more earnest fashionistas.
Given that she has
made a lifelong three-ring circus out of her dress sense, it would be
easy to dismiss Apfel as an eccentric show-off rather than exalt her
as a permanent performance artist. But she emerges here as a
down-to-earth, self-mocking, savvy philosopher, a one-off combination
of Madame de Pompadour and a borscht-belt standup: it’s not just
Iris’s glasses that recall George Burns, but her wit too.
Albert Maysles –
who died in March aged 88, and whose penultimate film this is – is
best known for the verite-style documentaries he made with his late
brother David, notably Grey Gardens (1975), a deeper, darker portrait
of two somewhat more troubled grandes dames. Iris is a slight,
conventional affair by Maysles’s standards, and a touch repetitive
– endless bolts of fabric and panoplies of costume jewellery laid
out for our appreciation. And you can’t help thinking that a
socialite who can afford to indulge her style might by nature be less
interesting than those people who manage to fuel their sartorial
fancies on a shoestring. But Iris Apfel’s whole being – like this
entertaining study – is a bracing advert for the pleasures of
living large, and loud, into old age.
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