The premise of Kevin Macdonald’s High & Low-John Galliano lends itself well to the documentary format, given that it charts the zenith and nadir of the career of a famous fashion designer. The highs are insane, and the lows plummet to profound depths.
The first half of the film captures Galliano’s rise from the boutiques of London to the haute-couture scene in France. A few passages in the first half stand out, thanks to the nuggets of information Kevin presents. One is about how Galliano was inspired by Abel Gance’s silent film Napoléon to create an extravagant clothing style among the elite.
During the French Revolution, youngsters apparently resisted the trend of clothes without extravagant styling, and this film shows how Galliano channels this through his fashion.
The other, more fascinating, portion is typical of Kevin’s brand of storytelling. First, through a mix of voiceover and fashion footage, he shows Galliano’s response to the abuse he faced in childhood for homosexual tendencies, and the resultant trauma. There is a sequence about his father beating him up for calling an old man “gorgeous”.
The director juxtaposes this with a moment where Galliano, now a successful fashion designer, clad in a pink T-shirt that says “gorgeous”, walks the ramp with a couple of women. It is particularly provocative for the blink-and-you-miss-it way in which Kevin presents it, much like how he addresses Idi Amin’s meat-eater reputation in The Last King of Scotland.
By this time, the film leaves you engrossed in its world-building, full of dramatic lighting that highlights the models and their garments, the clicking of camera shutters, and the energetic background music. For a good part, watching the film is like being on the front row of a fashion show.
Things become uncomfortably quiet after a sudden revelation: Galliano’s anti-Semitic comments and his subsequent fall from grace. Kevin, however, never leans too much towards or away from his subject. At the start, editor Edward Enninful calls Galliano the “rock and roll of fashion”, and the film also involves everyone from Charlize Theron to Penélope Cruz showering him with praise. But, it never restricts its subject to adulation; it also calls him out for what he did, and does a good job of showing how fame gets to his head, how he becomes addicted to his job, and how he unravels emotionally. It brings you closer to celebrities, reinforcing the fact that they are, after all, human.
High & Low-John Galliano
Director: Kevin MacDonald
Genre: Biopic
Platform: MUBI
Language: English
Rating: 3/5