Film reviews: High & Low: John Galliano | Origin | Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
High & Low: John Galliano (15) ****
Origin (12A) **
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (18) ****
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 talking-head 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.
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Hide AdSeveral times, for instance, Macdonald invokes Napoleon, largely because Galliano talks about how formative a screening of Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon film was on his work. But Macdonald clearly thinks he’s got a Napoleon complex, which Galliano refutes at one point, even though there’s plenty of footage of him parading around in the hat and outfit acting like an egocentric monster. We frequently see him on the catwalk too, looking like a pirate or a matador, perhaps unconsciously tempting the public skewering that would come later. Clearly this is a man with very little self-awareness.
He's also, of course, one the pioneering fashion designers of his generation and was a leading light at the very moment the industry itself exploded into mainstream pop culture consciousness. Macdonald gives us a comprehensive overview of why he was important and where his creative genius lay, but he also starts seeding ideas about addiction, the pressures of work and fame, and Galliano’s surface understanding of the world he liberally drew on for inspiration, partly to show us how these things were magnified in problematic ways when he was appointed creative director of Parisian fashion houses Givenchy and Dior in the mid-1990s.
Were, for instance, controversial shows like his notorious hobo-chic collection – mercilessly parodied in Zoolander – just thoughtless expressions of a relentlessly creative mind or early examples of a more deep-rooted prejudice? Macdonald’s film doesn’t give a definitive answer, largely because Galliano pleads ignorance himself, admitting only to being too black-out drunk to remember his anti-Semitic tirade, even claiming to not realise there had been more than one outburst (an extraordinary moment). At this point the tone of the film changes. 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.
Anti-Semitism is explored again in Origin, Ava DuVernay’s creatively flawed attempt to dramatise Pulitzer prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction best-seller 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. It’s a provocative idea, but it’s also one that might have benefitted from a rigorous documentary along the lines of DuVernay’s own prison film 13th. Instead she gives us a film about Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) researching and writing the book while grieving the sudden loss of her husband (played by Jon Bernthal) and her elderly mother (Emily Yancy). 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.
A far more interesting and successful filmmaking experiment is to be found in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, a brilliantly outré, nearly three-hour-long mind-melter of a film from the Romanian director Radu Jude. A sort of free-form, largely black-and-white state-of-the-nation provocation, it follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a sleep-deprived production assistant for a film and video company in Bucharest that has been hired by a negligent Austrian company to coerce employees injured at work to implicate themselves by appearing in health and safety videos admitting they didn’t wear regulation safety helmets. It’s patently absurd, but horrifying at the same time, and Jude ups the nightmarish quality of the film by cutting in a Ceaușescu-era Romanian film from 1981 entitled Angela Moves On and using its story – about a harassed female taxi driver – as a kind of parallel narrative mirroring the contemporary plight of Angela, who also posts satirical TikTok videos parodying Andrew Tate as her own form of protest against the ruinous state of the world. It’s pretty wild stuff, weird and fascinating in equal measure.
High & Low: John Galliano screens at Glasgow Film Festival on 5 and 6 March and is on general release from 8 March; Origin and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World are in cinemas from 8 March.