Iris Apfel shows off her unique and influential fashion sense in Albert Maysles documentary (photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures)
IRIS (Albert Maysles, 2014)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Wednesday, April 29
www.magpictures.com
mayslesfilms.com
“I like individuality,” self-described “geriatric starlet” and nonagenarian fashion doyenne Iris Apfel says at the beginning of octogenarian Albert Maysles’s penultimate film, Iris. “It’s so lost these days. There’s so much sameness. Everything is homogenized. I hate it. Whatever.” Iris celebrates that individuality, not only Apfel’s, who at ninety-three is still active in the fashion world, but Maysles’s, who passed away in March at the age of eighty-eight, leaving behind a legendary legacy that changed the face of documentary cinema, including such classics as Salesman, Grey Gardens, and Gimme Shelter. Throughout the film, Apfel speaks directly to Maysles, who ends up on camera several times, breaking that once-impenetrable fourth wall that he, his brother, David, and their partner, Charlotte Zwerin, helped tear down years ago. Maysles spent four years filming the Queens-born Apfel as she shared her lovely story, growing from an interior designer and textile-business owner to a world-renowned fashion collector, tastemaker, and rule breaker, accompanied all along the way by her husband of more than sixty-six years, Carl. Maysles shows Iris, in her trademark enormous circular-framed glasses and unique, colorful ensembles that mix designer clothing with a healthy dose of inexpensive accessories, as she bargains at a cheap local store, advises women at a special Loehmann’s event, prepares for her 2005 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, hawks her jewelry line on the Home Shopping Network, works on a window display at Bergdorf Goodman, and talks fashion with Martha Stewart, Tavi Gevinson, and others. Maysles interviews such designers as Alexis Bittar, Duro Olowu, Naeem Khan, and Dries van Noten, Met curator Harold Koda, Architectural Digest editor in chief Margaret Russell, and J. Crew head Jenna Lyons, who have only the most kind and generous things to say about the always positive Apfel, who has a genuine love of life. “It’s better to be happy than well dressed,” she tells friend and photographer Bruce Weber.
Nonagenarian Iris Apfel and octogenarian Albert Maysles display a love of life in IRIS (photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
Maysles also explores the Apfels’ inspiring relationship, filled with humor, a love of collecting knickknacks and tchotchkes (strewn about their cluttered apartment), and an infectious yen for trying anything and everything that life has to offer. The film concludes with Carl’s one-hundredth birthday party. Early on, Iris tells a story about one of her first jobs, toiling for Frieda Loehmann in Brooklyn. “One day she called me over and she said, ‘Young lady, I’ve been watching you.’ She said, ‘You’re not pretty, and you’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter. You have something much better. You have style.’” Iris indeed has style, as this wonderful documentary extols, a marvelous tribute both to her and Carl as well as Albert Maysles. Who needs pretty when something this beautiful is what emerges? Iris opens April 29 at Lincoln Plaza and Film Forum, where it will be preceded by Vivian Ostrovsky’s fashion short, Losing the Thread. Producers Laura Coxson and Rebekah Maysles, one of Albert’s children, will be at Film Forum for the 6:20 show on April 29, while Iris herself will participate in a Q&A following the 6:20 screening on May 1 and will then introduce the 8:20 show.
On Friday night, January 20, 2006, shortly after having Shabbat dinner with his family, twenty-three-year-old cell-phone salesman Ilan Halimi was kidnapped in Sceaux, and the perpetrators demanded 450,000 Euros as ransom. What happened over the next twenty-four days eventually shocked France and the rest of the world as the details of the abduction, and its frightening anti-Semitic roots, were made public. Director Alexandre Arcady tells the harrowing true story in 24 Days, a gripping procedural that follows the Halimi family and the police as they try to save Ilan’s (Syrus Shahidi) life and find what became known as the Gang of Barbarians, led by Ivory Coast native Youssouf “Django” Fofana (Tony Harrison). Zabou Breitman gives a powerful performance as Ruth Halimi, Ilan’s mother, who quickly grows unhappy with the police’s plan, which involves her ex-husband and Ilan’s father, Didier (Pascal Elbé), challenging Django over the course of hundreds of phone calls, aided by Commander Delcour (Jacques Gamblin) and police psychologist Brigitte Farrell (Sylvie Testud). With time running out and the police refusing to acknowledge the situation as a hate crime, the family becomes even more desperate, leading to a chilling conclusion.
(T)error is a great name for a horror movie, but even though it turns out that Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe’s debut is not part of that genre, there still is plenty scary about it. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Break Out First Feature at Sundance, (T)error is a surprising look inside one aspect of the FBI’s counterterrorism program. Shortly after Saeed “Shariff” Torres, a friend and neighbor of filmmaker and photojournalist Cabral’s, suddenly disappeared, he contacted her, eventually letting her inside his secret career as a longtime FBI informant. A Muslim and former Black Panther revolutionary, the sixty-three-year-old school kitchen employee and father of a young son goes on camera as he takes on what he claims will be his final assignment, cozying up to a Pittsburgh man named Khalifa Ali Al-Akili, previously known as James Marvin Thomas Jr., who the FBI thinks might be involved in terrorist plots. It’s not exactly the most thrilling game of cat and mouse; Cabral and codirector Sutcliffe (Adama) follow Shariff as he goes about a lot of mundane business, arguing over how much money the FBI gave him, text-messaging back and forth with agents and his prey, examining Facebook pages, and Skyping with his son, whose face is blurred for protection. And Sharrif is not quite the kind of well-trained operative you read about in books or see in action-packed movies, making one wonder just what the FBI is thinking — and how it’s spending our money — especially after a major twist occurs about halfway through the film, turning everything around and inside out, providing a new vantage point that makes the whole sting operation even more bizarre and surreal. But it’s all too real, and rather frightening in its own very strange way. (T)error is screening April 21, 23, and 24 at the Tribeca Film Festival, with the filmmakers participating in Q&As after all three shows.
