If Vivienne Westwood weren’t so inexplicably interesting, Lorna Tucker’s movie about her – Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist. – might be unwatchable. The documentary is kind of a mess, maybe by intention. It shifts directions, jumps around in time, picks up characters, loses them, doesn’t always tell you who is talking, and never clues in the audience about when what happened.
From Westwood’s clothing and hair styles, you might discern that this bit of footage comes from the 70s, or that from the ‘90s, but at least for a time, she was a rebel and a punk avant-gardist, so placing her in time is no easy trick. Westwood is also not a reliable narrator of events in her own life, which also might be intentional.
The movie opens with Vivienne Westwood settling into a comfy chair in front of the camera, looking put upon, but stylish, and telling the filmmakers, presumably, that she doesn’t really want to do this – the interview presumably. It’s a gutsy move for a film to begin with the subject saying she’s bored. Westwood soon turns to her first marriage, which did not meet the “American dream” – maybe she doesn’t know that the “American dream” is not about marriage; plus, she’s an English woman, living in England, so it’s unclear how the American dream applies to her life in the first place.
Westwood claims that she started punk in the 1970s, from the back of a small shop in London called SEX, which she ran with Malcolm McLaren, who managed the punk band The Sex Pistols. There’s a whiff of truth in that. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem that Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist. has much beyond a passing commitment to literal reality.
Watching the movie is like wandering through a photo gallery where the pictures are still strewn on the floor. There’s the regal Vivienne Westwood in a flowing black dress with her lovely white hair styled with expensive casual elegance. In random order come photos of her in her schoolgirl bangs, then some punky images with her spiky hair. In other archival clips and photos, Westwood looks worn out, with her head covered like someone undergoing chemotherapy, although the picture never mentions any cancer episode.
Many years ago, Westwood married a much younger man named Andreas. One of her sons says that he’s glad she has someone who is devoted to her. Andreas is also credited as perhaps the primary designer in the Westwood empire, but after that tidbit of information, Andreas disappears from the film for a good while, and he’s absent from many scenes of the Westwood staff hard at work.
Another question is how Westwood went from penniless avant-gardist to business mogul with shops all over the world. The change looks so quick, you wonder if fame and riches just zapped her over breakfast one morning. While she – in one of her guises – says the company is too big and she wants to regain control by downsizing, the film shows new shops opening in New York and Beijing. Then, the CEO of the company, who looks like Tony Soprano, appears to say he worked out a deal for Westwood’s company that made him rich, and you have to wonder what is THAT story about and how does this guy fit into all that Vivienne Westwood has said about herself as a rebel?
I came away from Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist. clueless about what holds this picture together or really what it’s about. It’s colorful, certainly, and Westwood’s fascinating the couple of times that she actually talks about the work of clothing design – as opposed to distracted sketchy musings. Her description of how design involves literally attending to every single stitch is remarkable. There are blunt shots of models treated like mannequins, with people messing with their hair, yanking a blouse up or down, or whatever. Maybe the movie itself IS punk – deliberately disorganized and annoying, visually arresting – and, of course provocative.
