McQueen

The most direct approach to exploring the life of an extraordinary man is through a simple step-by-step chronology.

That's the route taken by directors Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui in assembling McQueen. It's an alternately pedestrian and spectacular examination of renegade British fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, whose path from an unassuming upbringing in London's East End to an education in tailoring on Savile Row to superstardom ended abruptly in 2010 when he took his life at age 40.

It wasn't easy for the directors to earn the trust and cooperation of McQueen's protective family, who were understandably uneasy about cooperating in a venture that would, along with unveiling the often bizarre and cutthroat world of those who live and breathe couture, surely reveal unsavory aspects of generational relationships ("all families are crazy," even the enviable ones, as one of our once friends noted) that are best kept to themselves.

But the filmmakers persevered, eventually acquiring grainy home movies, broadcast footage of TV interviews and fashion events, and lining up frank videotaped conversations with relatives, boyfriends, business associates, models and others. It turns out that there were indeed many secrets to be revealed about this chubby, cheerful, ambitious, obsessive, and talented artist who loved his dogs and his work.

"No one discovered Alexander McQueen," said John McKitterick, for whom McQueen labored.

But this film is not concerned with streetwear. It's focused on the designer's runway shows, insanely imaginative full-blown productions he constructed to share his outlandish originality with an adoring if sometimes confused public in the late 1990s. These clothes weren't wearable in the usual sense; they were experiments in decoration -- think derriere-exposing low-slung pants, robots rhythmically spraying paint on a white evening dress, and attire that looked like it was gathered from a crime scene -- with little regard for convention.

This sort of outside-the-box thinking takes its toll, and after a few too many scenes of McQueen dutifully stitching jackets and struggling to learn his craft, the film explodes into defining the brutal cost of going where few have gone before. "He wanted people to feel emotion at his shows," a friend comments -- repulsed or exhilarated, it made no difference to McQueen. Despite losing an alarming amount of weight, being HIV positive, exhausted from creating as many as 14 collections a year, and increasingly unhappy, he kept on working.

Revealing remarks about how grueling success turned out to be for McQueen are shared by his earnest assistant designer Sebastian Pons and aristocratic stylist Isabella "Issie" Blow, a mentor to McQueen. She died in 2007 at the age of 48 after swallowing poison, her seventh suicide attempt in 14 months. Then he lost his adored mother, Joyce McQueen, on Feb. 2, 2010. Days later (Feb. 11), McQueen hanged himself.

Pons explains: "He said to me, 'I've designed my last collection ... when the show ends this box is gonna come out from the ground with me inside, and then I'm just gonna shoot myself.'"

Yet it appears that it was McQueen himself, not the artificial and competitive environment that engulfed him, who ended his story.

MovieStyle on 08/17/2018