The genius and shame of a superstar designer
Kevin Macdonald’s new film High & Low: John Galliano offers a fascinating portrait of the disgraced British fashion designer, one that could easily be viewed as yet another officially sanctioned sorry/not sorry mea culpa, but which is more subtly damning than you might expect given Galliano’s willing participation and the financial involvement of Vogue publishers Condé Nast.
Framed by an incontrovertibly ugly anti-semitic rant caught on a videophone in a Parisian café in 2010, the bulk of the film is comprised of a series of new interviews with Galliano, now in his 60s, who promises to tell us everything about how he ended up at that point in his life. Interspersed with archival footage and talkinghead interviews with friends, family members, journalists, psychiatrists, celebrity pals and insiders from the world of high fashion, the interviews with Galliano himself are framed head on, as if he’s delivering a monologue, which seems appropriate for someone who appears to have lived his life in a very performative manner.
Macdonald gives us a comprehensive overview of why he was important and where his creative genius lay, but as conflicting accounts of the fall-out that followed his arrest and prosecution for a hate crime emerge, the film becomes a nuanced exploration of the celebrity damage-control industry, one in which the sight of this somewhat cowed, evasive, creatively burned out and slightly pathetic figure being cosseted by powerful friends (all interviewed by Macdonald) becomes
increasingly uncomfortable to watch.
Origin (12A) JJ
Anti-semitism is explored again in Origin, Ava Duvernay’s creatively flawed attempt to dramatise Pulitzer prizewinning writer Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Wilkerson’s thesis – as outlined in the movie – is that caste, not race, is the main system of oppression in the world and a better understanding of how slavery connects to the Holocaust and
the Indian caste system might offer a more productive way forward in terms of confronting the issues afflicting the United States. Part grief memoir, part travelogue, part didactic essay film, Origin also dramatises outrages both recent (the 2017 murder of Treyvon Martin) and old (Nazi book burnings, Jim Crow-era lynchings) in an attempt to make history seem like a living thing. Alas, any resistance Wilkerson encounters to her ideas is brushed off too easily for her eventual thesis to be all that convincing.