The most potent, and poignant, tribute in the sweet back-scratch of a documentary “Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards” is that Anna Wintour lets you see her eyes.
Normally, that fearsome Vogue editor wears sunglasses — in the front row of fashion shows; when she was made a dame earlier this year. But for Manolo Blahnik, maker of some of the most sublime women’s footwear of the past four decades, she drops the lenses and lets her eyes, and feelings, show.
Blahnik inspires this warmth by dint of his shoes and also his character, which is eccentrically patrician, starry eyed, elegant. (He wears the hell out of a lilac suit.) He’s a man who describes wisteria — the word, but presumably also the plant — as “so Olympic, it’s so hedonistic in a way.”
But this film, directed by the fashion writer and editor Michael Roberts, doesn’t aspire beyond embrace. It rushes through Blahnik’s biography, dwelling on pop-culture moments and blandly ecstatic celebrity testimonials (not counting the uproarious André Leon Talley, who insists Blahnik is “up there with Baudelaire”). It also leans heavily at times on recreated footage of Blahnik’s childhood, as well as on a bizarre scene imagining a 1930s African society party in which a white woman emerges from a gorilla costume.
There is little accounting of his inner life, or for that matter of his creative gifts, which are quite exquisite. And though there are some cleverly conceived but blindingly lighted scenes of Blahnik shoes in nature, or nestled amid sculpture or architecture, there is nothing systematic to the way the shoes are discussed or filmed. In a scene puzzlingly late in the film, Blahnik, who apparently still makes samples by hand, walks through his factory and finesses a sensuous heel out of a stump of wood. More of that would have made this confection about a radiant man into something sturdier.
MOVIE REVIEW
“Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards”
Grade: C
Starring Manolo Blahnik and Anna Wintour. Directed by Michael Roberts.
Unrated. At Tara Theatre. 1 hour, 29 minutes.
Bottom line: Could've used more accounting of the designer's inner life and creative gifts
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