© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Shoes For Lizards And A 'Happy End' From Howie

Courtesy of Music Box Films
Manolo Blahnik

People who know me recognize that my devotion to fashion is limited. Fashion makes little sense to me, and even though I've watched The Devil Wears Prada three times, and admired Stanley Tucci's great speech about the importance of fashion to daily life, I still don't relate to fashion in any useful way. So, I am not in the target audience for Michael Roberts’ documentary about the famed shoe designer Manolo Blahnik.

The picture has plenty of energy; it jumps around with lively music; it stages a musical scene based on the lurid 1932 film Blonde Venus, with Marlene Dietrich. Interviews dance from famous fashion person to celebrity to another famous fashion person, and they all extol the greatness of Manolo’s shoe designs. Many of the major fashion designers have their models wear Manolo’s shoes on the runways. The bounce in the film is contagious. Manolo’s an interesting guy. He was born and raised in the Canary Islands, and as the title indicates, when he was little, he imagined shoes for small animals. Manolo has always loved shoes, although, in case we’re wondering, he says directly that he does not have a foot fetish.

One of the fashion writers in the movie ranks Manolo as one of the three great Spanish artists of the past century – along with Picasso and filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. It’s a big statement, but the problem is that no one in the movie bothers to say why, just as no one in the movie really describes the greatness of Manolo Blahnik’s shoe designs. One person does say that they’re comfortable, a statement I find mystifying, from the looks of the shoes. Otherwise, unless you already know why Manolo’s considered such a terrific artist, the movie isn’t about to tell you. In the same way, the film reveals that Manolo loves the work of the British photographer Cecil Beaton, yet you never learn how that appreciation came to be. I’d love to know why this designer of outlandish footwear responds so powerfully to a photographer, an artist whose work holds close to actuality.

The film is too much for those already initiated, for true believers, and not for anyone who wants to learn the why of the superlatives pasted upon this man who calls himself – at times – simply a cobbler. The great line of the film, for me comes from the singer Rihanna, who says about Manolo’s shoes, “I love a shoe that can make another girl jealous.” That ambition that seems to me paltry.

Manolo, the Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards is like cotton candy. It's pure and sweet, and when you taste it, it's gone without a trace.

On a different note, the fine Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has a new picture, which played at the Toronto Film Festival and will be in theaters starting in October. The film is called Happy End, and for anyone who has ever seen a Michael Haneke film, an actual happy ending is unlikely. It’s certainly happier than the endings of Amour or Caché, though, and way happier than the end of either version of Funny Games.   

Happy End opens with the poisoning of a pet Guinea pig, progresses to a structural collapse at a construction site – a worker is killer – and proceeds through legal cover-ups, love affairs, both in and out of marriage, and other loud behaviors. Haneke films the picture with a rock-steady camera and images so sharply focused they look to be made of crystal.

Michael Haneke (center) at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Credit Howie Movshovitz

Like many of his films, Happy End is about a family in all its multilayered dysfunction. This family happens to live in Calais, on the English Channel, and the presence of the sea, for good or ill, is fundamental. In the Q and A after the film in Toronto, Haneke said that he’s interested in families because “Our neuroses develop there,” and about the general tone of his movie, he added, “We live in farce.”

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
Related Content