WHEN ‘SEEING TOO MUCH IS SEEING NOTHING’
Documentary skirts its own cultural core
Trapped inside The First Monday in May is a provocative, insightful documentary about western appropriation of eastern culture. Alas, it keeps being beaten back down by shots of celebrities. Is this a clever metaphor for the cynical state of the media in 2016?
Maybe not: the movie was co-produced by Vogue publisher Condé Nast. In fairness, Vogue’s involvement did secure director Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, Ivory Tower), and access to his subject, the annual fundraiser for the Costume Center at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even the A-listers in attendance at the 2015 Met Gala, celebrating the exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, weren’t allowed to shoot selfies.
Much of the movie shows the event being planned, as steely Vogue editor Anna Wintour and her team pore over the guest list with bitchy panache (“Josh Hartnett? What has he done lately? Nothing”), decide who will sit where (a problem worthy of a graduate-level logic exam), and struggle with Rihanna’s fee for performing.
Wintour’s counterpart at the Met is lanky English curator Andrew Bolton, whose plan was to show China’s influence on western fashion by displaying designer clothes and costumes on lavish sets among the museum’s galleries of Chinese decorative art. Bolton announces he is “not afraid of controversy,” and indeed, he features John Gallia- no, who was turfed from Christian Dior in 2011 for declaring his “love” for Hitler, and who in the film raves about his “fantasized version of China.”
Eventually Rossi tackles the issue of appropriation, and here’s where the film starts to show an edge. It explores the Dragon Lady and Lotus Flower Hollywood stereotypes of Chinese women that inspired some of the designers, and gives vent to the skepticism of the Museum’s Curator of Asian Art — he fears the western fantasies will dwarf and diminish the museum’s historic Chinese artifacts. Bolton and Wintour, on a promotional tour, submit to a tense interview by a journalist in China, and the exhibition’s artistic director, Kar-Wai Wong (who helmed In the Mood for Love), advises Bolton that images of Mao shouldn’t be mixed with statues of the Buddha, and that he should avoid making the show too busy, “because seeing too much is seeing nothing.”
But Kar-Wai remains on the periphery, and these issues are largely set aside, as if they’re merely another obstacle to be overcome by the plucky principals, along with the usual realityshow clichés. How will they ever get all 250,000 roses stuck on a giant vase in time for the opening?
We already know they will, and the movie settles into a record of the gala itself: the likes of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian gawk at Rihanna’s magnificent dress (designed by China’s Guo Pei, who gets maybe a minute in the film), and grin as she says something scripted about how two cultures are coming together, before launching into Bitch Better Have My Money.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Bolton wanders around his collection, the realization of a childhood dream.
Clearly there’s potentially much more to this exhibition than the story of intrepid westerners making money by displaying eastern-influenced clothes, but as the credits roll over shots of Vogue staffers fawning over photos of the celebs’ pseudo-Chinese garb, China itself remains the elephant in the room.