With Oscar's documentary longlist out, we're catching up with a few. Here's Deborah on Iris.
Sometimes all you need is a great subject.
To say this does a disservice to documentarian Albert Maysles, who has created a visual feast with Iris, but the primary delight of the film is Iris herself. Iris Apfel, at 94 years old, has lived a life of visual feast. If your tolerance of eccentric little old ladies is low, you won’t love this film, but phooey on you in that case. This woman is a prize, a person who celebrates her own uniqueness, who takes joy wherever she can, and the film focuses on that joy...
Iris Apfel was an interior designer to the high society set, and, in the context of that work, co-founded (with her husband Carl) the company Old World Weavers in 1950, specializing in fabric restorations and recreations. She and Carl traveled the world for their company. While traveling, the ever-stylish Iris began collecting clothing and jewelry.
In 2005, at the age of 84, Iris was the subject of a costume exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and suddenly went from being someone known in “society” to being a fashion icon.
In some corners Iris has been criticized for being insubstantial. It’s not, say, 20 Feet From Stardom, which acts like it’s about something fairly fluffy—backup singers—and ends up commenting on racism, the music industry, and the struggle for recognition. Iris stays about Iris all the way through, although you can certainly walk away with a message about a life well lived, and about playfulness. Iris’s comments about “pretty” and how unimportant it is are superb. Nonetheless, Maysles doesn’t pretend his film is anything but a portrait, and doesn’t try any self-important documentary tricks. At one point, we see Iris talking to and about Maysles, so that the veneer of invisibility is stripped away, and I appreciate that.
The film is not unlike Bill Cunningham New York, in which Iris appears, and indeed, Bill Cunningham appears in this film. She’s a New York eccentric and a style icon, he’s a New York eccentric and a photographer of style. They’re perfectly matched, and it’s fair to say that if you like one of these documentaries, you’ll like the other.
Both Bill Cunningham and and Apfels are a kind of vanishing New Yorker. The city used to be filled with this sort of eccentric, singular person, wending their ways through the city, thriving on the various unique culture that life in New York offers. Unlike Cunningham, the Apfels are wealthy, but not in the manner of the “OMG what’s happened to the city -- who can afford to live here?” new New Yorkers. These films describe not just individuals, but a kind of New York persona that will one day be gone. There are resonances of this as we see Iris selling and donating parts of her enormous collection, but the sad moments in Iris are fleeting, and the takeaway is joy.
Carl Apfel, Iris’s husband of 67 years, passed away two months ago (August 2015), just shy of his 101st birthday.
Deborah Lipp blogs about television at Basket of Kisses and sometimes goes out to eat.