Nearly a year ago, the cinetrix opted not to see The September Issue at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, even though fabulous son of Durham/Vogue gadabout André Leon Talley would be in attendance. There's a certain calculus to choosing films to see at festivals, particularly Full Frame, which traditionally screens each movie only once [unless it nabs an award and thus an encore Sunday afternoon screening, by which time I'm on the road home]. September definitely had distribution and wouldn't suffer from small-screen presentation; better to see something that might disappear without a trace.
Enough with the Basil Exposition. On to the caveats! Cut back to the almost-present, which is to say last night, whereupon I tried to break through my near pathological inability to sit and watch dvds at home with steely Anna Wintour's help. Now, I haven't read fashion mags since Harper's Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis was claimed by ovarian cancer, but I will admit to a longstanding addiction to cult leader Tyra Banks's indoctrination camp -- and I do mean camp -- "America's Next Top Model," which boasts Talley as a judge this "cycle." So what better time, right?
I've also worked for monthly magazines. So, while the outre fashion and the outsized personalities were entertaining, I was most taken by how filmmaker R.J. Coulter documents the process of putting together the book. He's no Fred Wiseman, but Vogue is definitely an institution with a lot of moving parts. We see the sales side and the creative side, much more in fact than the actual editorial -- you know, the people charged with stringing copy underneath and alongside the fashion fantasias creative director Grace Coddington creates and Anna Wintour sells to advertisers, designers, and regular old readers.
Ultimately, though, it all comes back to the wall, where individual pages are ordered and reordered, inspected and discarded according to the flinty editor-in-chief's gimlet eye. Does this shot tie in with the feature's ostensible theme of texture? Is there too much black? Does that color pop? Will this opener beckon the reader more than that one? Will we get the reshoots and close on time? Do we have a cover? Wintour addresses all these questions with decisiveness, impatience, and an absence of sugarcoating.
Yeah, she's "frosty" and an "ice queen" -- because she's a she. Duh. Most feared figure in a multibillion-dollar industry status be damned, we all know that a man with Wintour's manner would be lauded for a businesslike refusal to suffer fools, not pilloried with a parody that finds Meryl Streep dismissing underlings with a soft "That's all." [What's less immediately apparent but all the more refreshing is this is a film featuring somewhat-wrinkled older women with high-powered jobs that passes the Bechdel test.] And as every reviewer has noted, it's Grace Coddington who makes off with the movie. Yes, but in addition to her manifest charms, let's face it: her job description is artist and genius, not "bad guy."
Coddington is not the only discovery. One of the best bits, which involves Talley, is mysteriously relegated to the dvd's deleted scenes. As he takes the film crew with him to the shirt maker he goes to in Paris -- to have them run up the appropriate attire for brunch on Karl Lagerfeld's St. Tropez terrace, don'tcha know -- he shares the story of the grandmother who raised him and set him on the path of fashion. She made sure he was always turned out, traveling to D.C. and New York to buy clothing even though she worked as a maid in the men's dormitories at Duke. Now, that's a film I want to see.
Instead, September settles for peering respectfully through the strategically revealing cracks and chinks in Wintour's couture armor, offering only fleeting glimpses of the anger she ruefully admits to inheriting from her journo dad. When it (her anger) gets to be too much, she intimates, it'll be time to stop. Until then, there's the next issue to worry about.
Otherwise, in this portrait of a woman so known for her cold hauteur, the real revelation comes in the few domestic scenes. There's no Devil Wears Prada beat reassuring audiences that Wintour may be in charge at work but her power is ultimately worthless because her personal life is a shambles, making her a failure as a woman blah blah blah. And like all the other scenes in this authorized-access account, they are meant to burnish an image of Anna Wintour in control. And yet.... Dark glasses off, ropey arms for once unfolded, a beaming Wintour looks at her daughter Bee with an expression that is so naked, so amazed at and smitten with her child, that one can finally imagine Anna happy.
