Hot Docs ’18: McQueen

**½/****
directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s McQueen opens, as any look at Alexander McQueen, the queer, working-class, Stratford-raised ruffian turned couturier might well be expected to, with an aesthetic contradiction. The opening credit sequence, which unfolds as a series of smooth pans and tilts across extreme close-ups of baroque, CG-kissed headgear and flower-enmeshed skulls, soon gives way to ratty old videotape of the designer in his pre-Givenchy days, punning on “haute couture” and looking more like a hired hand than like one of the most influential designers of the late twentieth century. The contrast arguably makes for an easy rhetorical move and a reductive treatment of a mercurial man. But in McQueen’s case, the clichéd approach to the departed artist as a divided self–a schlubby guy who made impossible clothes for people who might never have been in his orbit in another life–feels appropriate and true, and marks a fair introduction to the equal attention the filmmakers pay to Lee, the unassuming and devoted family member, friend, learner, and tailor, and McQueen, the image-maker who channelled his own dark history and mental-health struggles into his creations.

The filmmakers’ classical five-part structure lends a preordained tragic air to their story that’s suitable to the melodramatic and referential nature of McQueen’s output, if also overdetermined. The doc is at its most compelling, though, when it wriggles out of this rigid crinoline cage form. This is especially true when it pivots between remarkable archival footage of the soft-spoken, rather ordinary-looking designer at work and in conversation with his many peers and hangers-on and interviews with the present-day versions of these friends of McQueen–rumpled and lined in a way that Lee, who killed himself at 40, never got to be–recollecting him with the measured respect of people who’ve already worked out their issues in therapy. For all the emotional extremes of his collections (viewed here both in progress and in well-documented runway shows), which run the gamut from the grotesquely violent to the valedictory and sombre, the portrait of McQueen that emerges is of a loyal if often paranoid man who viewed his work, including his designs for Givenchy and Gucci, as a relatively humble family affair–the product of not just the designer’s creative flashes, but also the individual craftworkers who laboured over each garment and the friends who counselled him and poured their own time, money, and emotional energy into him along the way.