Lately fashionable

The September Issue

Crit

Another entry in the 200nine sweepstakes: also playing downtown are 9 and District 9; we saw the trailer again for Nine; and the "coming soon" roundup on the website promises the German Wolke Neun (Cloud nine).

The shock in this one? Anna Wintour may wear Prada, but she's far more human than diabolical. We are treated, in fact, to the odd spectacle of someone who is without question the best in the world at what she does yet can't help being a bit defensive about that "what," as if she were the best paper-and-comb musician in the world, or perhaps the best masturbator. Her three siblings, she says, who have respectable grownup jobs like human rights lawyer and political editor of the Guardian, are all "a bit amused, I think, by what I do. [pause] Yes, they're amused."

The pause is one key to what is brilliant about this film. Like a good psychotherapist, director R. J. Cutler, DP Bob Richman, and editor Azin Samari have conspired to give sources space after their answers, and that silence is often filled with more telling remarks or expressions than the answers themselves. The other key is the yang to Wintour's icy yin, creative director Grace Coddington, who, unlike her boss (and associate for 30-odd years), is happy to have the cameras in her face, happy to share. Much of what she shares, of course, is unhappiness with the insufficient respect she feels her contribution gets from Wintour. What the two have is exactly like a long successful marriage: a shared private language that lets them work together without words--and lets them push each other's edgiest buttons just as easily.

A vastly more fun film that I'd have thought anything that takes fashion seriously and didn't have Isaac Mizrahi in it could be.

Trailers

• Good Hair--Chris Rock hosts a documentary about the incompatibility of mainstream (i.e., white) notions of beauty with the natural product of African follicles. Retraces the steps of an indy short of several years ago (seems like "nappy" was in the title, but I can't find it on IMDb), but Rock is bound to get it more attention.