RATING
Director(s): Sadie Frost
Country: United Kingdom
Actor(s): Twiggy, Dustin Hoffman, Joanna Lumley
Written by Tom Augustine
What a pleasure it is to see Twiggy rise above it all. At her peak, she was the kind of presence who seemed able to achieve things without any trouble at all, like water off a duck’s back. Endlessly charming, familiar, authentic and staggeringly beautiful, she made it look easy but seemed blissfully free of ego, as though preening or vanity had never occurred to her at all. Hers has not been an easy life — being a young woman, let alone a model, in the entertainment world of the mid-to-late 20th Century will do that — but that floating quality of imperviousness is rare, and what makes Twiggy such a remarkable figure in fashion and entertainment history. Truly, there is no one quite like her. She is thus the kind of figure who introduces an intriguing wrinkle for the documentarian. Her life has its fair share of antagonists and antiheroes — controlling boyfriends, abusive husbands, lecherous photographers many years her senior — but, whether because of Twiggy’s working class background and the hardships that naturally entails, or the warm but profound remove with which Twiggy seemed to take it all in, all these trials are remembered with a kind of near-blissful resilience, as though to say ‘well, that’s just life, isn’t it?’ It doesn’t make for easy pathways to drama and pathos — but in the hands of actress and fashionista-turned-filmmaker Sadie Frost, some of that bubbly positivity can be wrangled into the format of the documentary itself, leaving the viewer fizzing like freshly-poured champagne.
Twiggy, then, is a documentary that proves to be moving and well-accomplished because of its ability to translate that resilience and imperviousness — like the model’s distinctive laugh, it is bright, short-lived and full of energy. For much of its ninety minutes, it rumbles along at a steady clip, tracing the British teen’s meteoric rise from humble working class beginnings, through to the evolution of her career beyond the front covers of magazines. It’s striking how little of Twiggy’s life is spent as a cover girl: likely the most iconic single image of the woman formally known as Lesley Hornby was the first professional photograph ever taken of her, and as much (if not more) of her life was dedicated to being a star of stage and screen. It’s an illuminating portrait, one that lands precisely at the moment where the icon’s legend runs the risk of being reduced to that singular frame, that inimitable visage. It is of a piece with director Frost’s previous documentary Quant, another effervescent fashion profile — these are not films that necessarily plunder the depths of the fashion industry, but skim contentedly along the surface due to the easy company of their subjects. Like that film, Twiggy is largely content to under-dramatize, instead accentuating the factors that made Twiggy so singular. Twiggy herself, now 76, is a key fixture of the film, and the film’s intense proximity to her subjectivity is both its greatest strength and a subtle flaw.
Playing exclusively on Rialto Channel this month, Sadie Frost’s fleet-footed profile of the trailblazing working class It Girl is bubbly and propulsive enough to overcome the shortcomings of its traditional profile-doc trappings. Amassing a wealth of archival footage and surprising guest appearances, it is a well-earned appreciation for a multi-hyphenate possessed of an instinctual mastery of the pop-culture landscape.
Crowned ‘The Face of ‘66’ at just 16 years old and managed by a singularly unpleasant, ten-years-senior significant other, the self-styled ‘Justin De Villeneuve’ (a particularly odious hanger-on), Twiggy’s ability to remain a fixed object around which men and women (but especially men) orbit is fascinating to behold. One of the most significant clips utilised in the film is Twiggy’s notorious interview with Woody Allen, who quizzes the then-teenager on her favourite philosophers as a bald-faced attempt to belittle her. Twiggy’s good-humoured but pointed reversals, in turn interrogating a flustered Allen to draw up even a single example of a philosopher he likes, is intensely gratifying. It serves as a microcosm of a career in which her beauty and charm beguiled men, but never felt especially catered toward them — certainly a rarity at the time. As fascinating as the modelling years are, the most rewarding chapter of Twiggy are the years following, in which Twiggy found love and trouble with tortured actor Michael Witney, established herself as a formidable singing and acting talent in films by Ken Russell and others, and had a child of her own.
Throughout it all, Twiggy is peppered with consistently intriguing and rewarding guest interviews, ranging from the deadpan (a particular highlight comes in the form of Joanna Lumley, who earns the film’s single best line in defanging the vicious insults levelled at her by pigheaded photographers of the day with a world-weary ‘It was okay…’), to the imaginative (Sir Paul McCartney, Dustin Hoffman) to the awed (Sienna Miller, Brooke Shields). It makes for a fairly boilerplate approach to the profile documentary format, with talking heads broken up by archival footage and the occasional slow-motion sequence of a modern-day Twiggy wandering the beach or working in her garden. There are indeed moments where the film’s insistent optimism and homogenised structure leads to missed opportunities — the film skirts up against interesting ideas about body image and the unintended harm of the rail-thin Twiggy’s reign as the Holy Grail of the fashion industry — but bounds too eagerly to the next subject to really hone in on a meaningful analysis. This bounding quality leads to some haphazard pacing as the film races toward its conclusion, too — by the final third of the film, one feels we are moving into a phase of box-ticking, making sure all the key points are covered, with utmost brevity. Regardless, by film’s end, is that ebullience with which Twiggy carries herself that sticks. Here is a figure with a truly admirable quality — she knew herself from the off, and found success in that without compromise.
Twiggy (dir. Sadie Frost) Premieres May 7 at 8:30pm on Sky’s Rialto Channel, or catch up anytime on Sky Go.