Mark Reviews Movies: MCQUEEN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 2, 2018

Director Ian Bonhôte's documentary McQueen gets off to a rough start. It follows the career of British fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, known as Lee to his friends and Alexander within the realm of his profession, with some behind-the-scenes footage and lots of talking heads. At the start, we don't learn much about the man, except that he rose quickly because of his innate talent and the way his abilities attracted the right people. He also rose because of or despite his actual designs, which often caused controversy among the fashion press.

There's simply not much about the man or his work beyond the simple observations. All of that changes—and quite dramatically—as it becomes clearer how McQueen's own life reflected his work and vice versa. Bonhôte and co-director Peter Ettedgui find their way deeper into McQueen's personal demons and how every design, as well as every one of his elaborate shows in London and Paris, had less to say about the state of the fashion industry. They were all about McQueen, trying to confront his past, contend with his present state of rising fame, and deal with his increasing uncertainty with his own future.

The key here, obviously, is McQueen's sense of design. He seemed a fairly ordinary child and teenager, coming from a working-to-middle class family in London, and at a certain point, he discovered that he had a knack for tailoring. According to his family and friends and colleagues, it was more than a knack: It was an almost preternatural ability. He never took measurements. He simply eyed a person's frame and would get to work stitching and sewing. The results were always perfectly tailored to an individual's physique.

This skill got him apprenticeships at fashion houses and, later, an education in design. It also caught the attention of Isabella Blow, an influential magazine editor who possessed the monetary means and professional influence to kick start someone's career in earnest. McQueen had been designing and making clothes with the bulk of his unemployment benefits. Once his designs started being the talk of London, he had to hide his face from the press, lest the government realize that he was working while on the dole.

Such details, both amusingly specific and generically non-descript, are common in the early stages of the documentary. The film seems to be banking on one's appreciation for the story of a scrappy young man who made it big by every available means. His talent is assumed, but to be perfectly honest, it doesn't come through at first.

In addition to his tailoring abilities, McQueen was famous for using a variety of unlikely materials for his designs. An entire dress, for example, might be made of plastic bags. A fine dress might be precisely ripped or torn in multiple places. The designs caught people's eyes, to be sure, and they also brought plenty of controversy, especially when his first official show had the theme of victims of Jack the Ripper and another collection was evocatively titled "Highland Rape." The designs for the latter show are almost exactly as one might expect: lots of garments ripped with violence at strategically revealing parts. They also, though, evoke a suit of armor.

It's around this point that the film, structured around a series of recordings that McQueen made to explain the aesthetic and theme of his higher-profile collections, finds its way. In a way, the film's own discovery of how to tell McQueen's story with honesty and specifics mirrors the course of the subject's own life. We can see McQueen's designs evolve in front of us. Bonhôte uses plenty of footage of his shows, which alternate between the rough-and-tumble near-anarchy of his London shows (At one point, a car on stage accidentally caught fire, and everyone just assumed that it was part of the show) and the posh sensibilities of his shows for Givenchy, a prestigious fashion house in Paris, where he served as creative director for five years.

The shows evolve, too, and they almost become as much works of performance art as showcases for fashion. One climaxes with a pair of robots more or less dancing with a model, before they let out an eruption of spray paint on a billowing white dress. Another set the audience in front of rows of two-way mirrors, meaning they have to stare at themselves until the show begins. When the models, dressed in a way to evoke the occupants of an asylum, take to the square runway, they can't see the audience. That one climaxes with the walls of a box at center stage dropping to reveal a nude woman hooked up to various tubes.

In the background of these fashions and shows is McQueen's life, which follows a sad trajectory that's common for people who reach unexpected fame. There's the personalization of business relationships, which leads him to feel alone. There are drugs. There's illness, and there's death. His past of suffering abuse as a child by his brother-in-law puts those early designs in a new light: They're as much about the strength of a survivor as they are about the violence implied by the fashion.

All of it comes through loudly and clearly. It's impossible to separate this man from his work, and McQueen does a fine job putting McQueen's life, which ended at the age of 40 by means of suicide, into the context of his work and his work into the context of his life.

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