Supermodels as They Age Are Focus of Documentary
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Lee Clower for The New York Times
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary
is “About Face: The Supermodels, Then and Now.” |
The Collection: A New Fashion App for the iPad. BOYISH in her gamin crop and tie, Isabella Rossellini faced down the camera. For sure, she acknowledged, aging is a bummer. “My social status has diminished because I know I’m not invited to the A parties anymore,” said Ms. Rossellini, 60. “My daughter is. As you grow older, you don’t count anymore.”
With that, she erupted into peals of laughter touched with rue, the legacy of a lifetime of highs and lows in front of the camera.
Her latest performance, captured by the photographer and filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, offers a dose of the candor that highlights his new documentary, “About Face: The Supermodels, Then and Now.” The film, to be broadcast Monday on HBO, pokes behind the fastidiously maintained facades of some of the most celebrated beauties of the last half-century.
Jerry Hall, China Machado, Marisa Berenson and Lisa Taylor are but a handful of the runway legends who wax funny and dour by turns as they reminisce with Mr. Greenfield-Sanders, taking up the highly charged issues of racism, drug abuse, self-image and, perhaps most provocatively, the topic of age, fashion’s last and, arguably, most fearsome taboo.
The subject rivets the filmmaker, who was eager to explore, he said, “the power of beauty and fame, what that does to your ego, what it does to you when that fades.”
The project, which originated as a photo shoot for VanityFair, could be mined, he suspected, for something more. “These women were still out there, after all,” he said, “still togging along and trying to be somebody.”
Very much like Mr. Greenfield-Sanders, who has been photographing outsize personalities in the worlds of art, literature, music and film for the better part of his 60 years. The limelight, he knows, is hard to relinquish.
“Even though you may feel that moment is gone, that you’ve been marginalized, you don’t want to give up,” he said. “You still want to be in the world, making a mark on the world.”
The documentary, shown at the Sundance Film Festival, follows several others by Mr. Greenfield-Sanders, including a Grammy-winning film about the rocker Lou Reed and, more controversially, “The Black List,” a three-part series on HBO examining the lives of accomplished African-Americans, among them Faye Wattleton, the former president of Planned Parenthood, and Vernon Jordan, the civil rights activist and presidential adviser.
His latest work will likely speak to several generations, though Sheila Nevins, the film’s producer, thinks that older women in particular “may find something special in the fact that beauty continues on some level, through either artifice or confidence.”
Ms. Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, suggested that viewers’ fascination, and her own, may have its ghoulish aspects. “Beautiful women getting older, women who decay, that’s always intriguing,” she said, especially when their livelihoods have rested on their looks. “They are their own instruments. What do you do when you’re a Stradivarius and you’re losing your strings?”
If you’re practical, you might check in for a tuneup, as did the defiantly silver-haired Carmen Dell’Orefice, who is still striking poses at 81. “If you had the ceiling falling down in your living room,” Ms. Dell’Orefice challenged in the film, “would you not go and have a repair?”
Karen Bjornson, a former star for Halston, tugged un-self-consciously at her features, acknowledging that she had had an eye lift before resuming her career at 50 on the Ralph Rucci runway. “It was money well spent,” Ms. Bjornson said, “getting the product in shape again.”
The relentless self-scrutiny endemic to the trade starts at a tender age.
“Working off your looks makes you pretty much the opposite of self-confident,” said Paulina Porizkova, the Czech-born former superstar. “Still, I don’t think any 15-year-old girl will turn down the chance to be called beautiful. You don’t realize at that point that you are also going to be called ugly.”
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