Film of the week: Iris

Albert Maysles’s last film is a typically deft exercise in subtle observation. If it appears at first glance to be a rather soppily enamoured tribute to 93-year-old fashion icon Iris Apfel, that’s because Iris herself is so well practised at eliciting adoration with her disarming candour and perfectly timed one-liners. It would take a genius to get underneath the surface of such a highly lacquered persona, yet that’s what Maysles is able to do. But you have to pay attention.

Of course, Iris is a dream documentary subject: chatty, funny and extraordinary to look at. Maysles’s previous foray into elderly eccentricity, 1975’s Grey Gardens, played on the contrast between the deluded self-image of its star, impoverished socialite Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, and the dilapidated reality captured by his camera; here, Iris is Maysles’s knowing collaborator, bringing the idea of ‘Iris’ to him on a plate. Through him we can revel in her wildly eccentric personal style, as well as peeking into her vast collections of fascinating stuff.

Iris (2014)

Iris has devoted her life, money and energy to finding and acquiring interesting pieces. Some of it is rare and antique, such as the expensively warehoused collection she drew on to service the wealthy clients who once hired her as an interior decorator. But many of her personal acquisitions sit on the line between kitsch and classic. Like her near-contemporary Andy Warhol, she has an eye for the grotesque menace that lurks under the plastered-on grin of mass-produced tat. When she dresses, she encases herself in clashing patterns and primary colours, and turns cheap (or not-so-cheap) outsize bangles and necklaces into a provocative statement by piling them up into phantasmagorias of jangling excess.

Now that she and her husband Carl have sold their interiors business and retired, this personal style has created a new career for Iris. Her input is much in demand by fashion houses and department stores, though Maysles shrewdly records the patronising tone that characterises many of these encounters. A big store wants to put ‘Iris’ mannequins in its windows and has mocked up paper cut-out masks to stick on them, though in the end they plump for replicas of her signature outsize glasses instead. At a stroke, the larger-than-life Iris – who is standing right there – is reduced to a cipher, cut down to manageable proportions by the young women who only a moment ago were fawning around her.

Albert Maysles with Iris Apfel

Meanwhile, her own and her husband’s increasing frailty haunts the film. “Whatever I have two of, one of them hurts,” as Iris puts it. For the patronising youngsters, this is tediously unfabulous. When she mentions during one meeting that she has things on her mind, they scoff – what silly things could this kooky old bird have to worry about? She mutters something about health, and it’s an awkward moment because her exasperation shows, and exasperation, like anxiety, is something she’s not allowed to express; the iridescent jewel beetle is not supposed to have an interior life.

Maysles’s film rescues Iris from this relentless exteriorisation, not by intruding on her secret thoughts but by presenting her as a performance artist whose practice is a deliberate and serious aesthetic choice rather than just a piece of batty eccentricity. Twentysomething fashionistas can ah-bless her all they like; Iris is a fully realised piece of work – as is Maysles’s portrait of her.