By Glenn Dunks
When we look back at our 2020 times stuck indoors for endless hours, I wonder what people will remember. Among the much more high profile television series and surprise album drops, I suspect one title many will find themselves reaching for in their memories is Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado. I have to admit to being entirely oblivious to the focus of Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch's documentary except a well-timed ‘appearance’ on RuPaul’s Drag Race just a week before the film premiered on Netflix. Unless I caught him on an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael, I guess.
What I discovered—and what I imagine is what will allow for fond remembrance of the movie once we are long out of isolation hubs—was something so very sweetly tender. A film that’s every bit as fabulous as the elaborate, bejewelled cloaks and capes its subject was famed for.
Mucho Mucho Amor isn’t a film that seeks to revel in the worst parts of our culture. Rather it’s a film that finds affection and empathy with a man who sought to do little more than bring positivity to lives of others. It’s a film that feels as delightfully curious about Mercado as they are the world around him and his lasting legacy as one of a graceful, domestic icon and one of the earliest Puerto Rican superstars. It’s a film that doesn’t seek to corner Mercado’s legacy and contort it into something it isn’t and never was. It's something of a tonic, let me tell you.
It’s quite witty, really, that Costantini and Tabsch use that word “legacy” in the title. As in its final stretches we learn that his manager began to exert extreme control over Walter’s image and even deviously accruing the rights to the name “Walter Mercado”, Mucho Mucho Amor then acts as not just a love letter to Mercado, but something of a cinematic tribute that means he will no longer just me be whatever his reputation may have lead people to believe. A washed-up relic from the ‘80s, probably. A queer kook like Liberace. Instead it rewrites the narrative and shows no matter how much his career was sabotaged, he will forever be this icon who meant so much to so many people.
And while that can sometimes cynically come off as little more than a work of image management, here that's is far from the case. It would be easy to make a film about Mercado that was mocking and gharish, but this isn't it. In that sense, it’s a miracle of a film. Surely, more of one than any of the television readings the strange and intensely fascinating psychic.
The film pairs rather well with P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes’ House of Cardin, one of the more strictly entertaining fashion documentaries of recent years. Like Mucho Mucho Amor, it goes against greater dramatic instincts and blessedly attach something of a career downfall or a tragic descent into drugs and booze. While this bio-doc about the divinely talented fashion designer Pierre Cardin lacks something like the poignancy of McQueen, the zesty quest for designer divinity like Bill Cunningham New York, or the social themes of The Gospel According to Andre, what makes it work is in how simply celebratory it is, shooting about as it does between Cardin's immense catalogue of achievements.
Sure, it's directed rather like the standard issue, but does pique interest in the push-pull between capitalist and socialist tendencies of his fashion world. And occasionally the rhythms of its talking heads and archival footage editing find real pops of contrast and textural shade, particularly around his work on Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and in the ways his career has often circled back around through recurring images. Ebersole and Hughes easily make the case for their film thanks to the inclusions of Dionne Warwick, Naomi Campbell and Hiroki Matsumoto among others who aren't shy about detailing what he has done for representation across the world. Although I do wish more had been made of various life threads that are left dangling off the film’s flamboyant cuff.
The directors previously directed the deliciously camp Mansfield 66/67 and while House of Cardin lacks that film’s propulsive strangeness, they share an energy that is impossible to deny.
Release: Mucho Mucho Amor is currently streaming on Netflix, while House of Cardin will be releasing later this month with a digital release in September (it’s also currently out in Australia in a few cinemas).
Oscar chances: I suspect Mucho Mucho Amor will play into awards season in some capacity, although I don’t know if the documentary branch would recognise something that could probably come across as too lightweight.