Isaac Mizrahi contemplates his future in fab documentary, UNZIPPED
UNZIPPED (Douglas Keeve, 1995)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Tuesday, March 22, 8:15 (Q&A with Isaac Mizrahi)
Saturday, March 26, 5:30 (Q&A with Douglas Keeve and executive producer Nina Santisi)
Sunday, April 10, 8:00 (Q&A with Isaac Mizrahi)
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.miramax.com
About halfway through Unzipped, Douglas Keeve’s thrilling 1995 documentary, which follows fashion designer extraordinaire Isaac Mizrahi as he puts together his fall 1994 collection following a critical disaster, Mizrahi says, “Everything’s frustrating; every single thing is frustrating. Except designing clothes. That’s not frustrating. That’s really liberating and beautiful. I don’t know, being overweight and not being able to lose weight, you know, that’s a problem. Anything you’re really working hard at and that’s not working, that’s a problem. But frankly, designing clothes is never a problem.” Of course, the statement doesn’t exactly ring true as Mizrahi, usually with his trademark bandanna wound around his wild, curly hair, encounters his fair share of difficulties as he meets with Candy Pratts and André Leon Talley from Vogue and Polly Mellen from Allure, expresses his hopes and fears with Mark Morris, Sandra Bernhard, Eartha Kitt, and his mother, and works with such supermodels as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Shalom Harlow, Linda Evangelista, Carla Bruni, Christy Turlington, and Amber Valletta. Along the way he makes endless pop-culture references, singing the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, citing scenes from The Red Shoes, Marnie, Valley of the Dolls, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and using Nanook of the North and The Call of the Wild as creative inspiration.
Mizrahi is a ball of neuroses throughout as he consults Ouija boards and Tarot cards to peek into his future and plays classical piano (Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”) to calm himself down. “I’m not that stressed out,” he says. “I hate when people tell me I’m stressed out.” In his first film, director Keeve (Seamless, Hotel Gramercy Park), who was dating Mizrahi at the time, and Oscar-winning cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Betrayal) switch from grainy black-and-white to color to sharp b&w as Mizrahi’s big show approaches, in which the major point of conflict is the designer’s desperate desire to use a scrim that will allow the high-powered audience to see the backlit silhouettes of the models as they change backstage, something not all the women, or his colleagues at Mizrahi & Co., are in favor of. The film opens with Mizrahi devastated by the reviews of his previous show and closes with him quietly examining the reviews for his fall collection; in between is a delightful look inside the crazy world of fashion. And then Mizrahi will have to do it all over again for the next season. Winner of the Audience Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, Unzipped is screening at Film Forum on March 22 at 8:15 and April 10 at 8:00 with Mizrahi present for Q&As and on March 26 at 5:30 with Keeve and executive producer Nina Santisi, in celebration of “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” the first museum exhibition on Mizrahi and his career, which just opened at the Jewish Museum and continues through August 7.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The opening line of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood picture, instantly sends chills down the spine of anyone who has seen the film or read the book on which it is based, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of the same name. The line is spoken in voice-over by the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), so haunted by the first Mrs. de Winter, the recently deceased Rebecca, that she never even gets a first name, depriving her of her own identity. While serving as a paid companion to snooty wealthy matron Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates) on a trip to Monte Carlo, the orphaned young woman meets the dapper but dark Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), an elegant widower who takes a liking to her. Following a whirlwind courtship, they are married, and Maxim takes his mousey bride to his castlelike Cornwall estate, Manderley, where she is constantly compared to and overshadowed by the ghost of Rebecca, idolized as the perfect woman by the large staff, in particular the grim housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who relentlessly tortures the second Mrs. de Winter. “You wouldn’t think she’d been gone so long, would you?” Mrs. Danvers tells her. “Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor, I fancy I hear her just behind me. That quick light step, I couldn’t mistake it anywhere. It’s not only in this room, it’s in all the rooms in the house. I can almost hear it now.” But just as the second Mrs. de Winter finally tries to establish herself — “I am Mrs. de Winter now” she declares to Mrs. Danvers — Maxim shares a shocking truth about the first Mrs. de Winter that turns her world inside out. 
Experimental director Marie Losier tells a very different kind of love story in the intimate documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, her debut feature-length film. In 1993, British industrial music legend Genesis P-Orridge, the founder of such highly influential groups as Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, and COUM Transmissions (and who changed his name from Neil Andrew Megson in 1971), married Jacqueline Mary Breyer, a nurse and singer who then changed her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. The two artists were so madly in love that they decided to become a single “pandrogynous” unit known as Breyer P-Orridge, undergoing various forms of plastic surgery to look more alike. Both their life and their music were influenced by the literary cut-up style developed by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, but the film itself has the feel that it too was cut up and randomly put back together, resulting in a seriously flawed and fractured narrative that has fascinating individual moments that don’t form a cohesive whole. Mixing in home movies, staged reenactments, archival concert footage, voice-over narration by Genesis, and new interviews (with such friends and colleagues as Tony Conrad, Marti Domination, Lili Chopra, and Peaches), Losier never quite gets to the heart of the matter. Much of the film feels as if something’s missing, as if the director got too close to her subjects and assumed the audience can fill in certain gaps. As she says in the project’s production notes, “The film will attempt to present the incredible complexity of Genesis’ personality from many different angles, most especially my subjective point of view. From my earliest films, my feeling has been that when shooting real life subjects, my very presence changes the reality of what I am filming. Therefore, I am not a neutral participant, but one equally engaged and inspired by what is happening in front of my camera.” As personal and revealing as the film gets at times, much of it also seems forced and overly arty. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is screening at various days and times through April 3 at the Rubin Museum in conjunction with the new site-specific interactive-exchange exhibition 
An orgy doesn’t go quite as planned in Yann Gonzalez’s dark, lurid, and silly directorial debut, You and the Night. The erotic tragicomedy evokes the films of Derek Jarman along with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and, primarily, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus as seven characters gather one evening for a night of debauchery in the name of love, desperate to fill the gaps in their sad lives. “It’s our secret vice. A little break from the eternal, maddening class struggle,” the Star (Fabienne Babe) tells a pair of cops who show up looking for a runaway boy. The party is hosted by trans gypsy maid Udo (Nicolas Maury); the other guests are Ali (Kate Moran), an older woman joined by her younger lover, Matthias (Niels Schneider); the Stud (soccer star Éric Cantona), who boasts of his enormous manhood (and then proves it); the Teen (Alain Fabien Delon, son of French screen idol Alain Delon), who has not developed his own identity yet; and the Slut (Julie Brémond), who can’t wait to do anyone and everyone. Over the course of the night, they share their dreams, relate their pasts, and search for love, set to a score by French electronic band M83, which is led by Anthony Gonzalez, Yann’s brother. The movie’s supposed to be dreamy and poetic, but instead it’s cold and artificial, often bathed in an unfeeling blue light that furthers the distance between the characters and the audience. It’s often hard to tell what’s supposed to be “real” and what’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, although Béatrice Dalle’s cameo as a whip-touting commissioner is, well, it just is. You and the Night is screening in FIAF’s “EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film” series on March 15 at 4:00 and 7:30; the series continues on Tuesdays through April 26 with such other films as Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, and Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, which are either set in the club scene or feature EDM-based soundtracks.