Lagerfeld Doc Is Engaging if Unilluminating

By his own account, Karl Lagerfeld did not want to be known. “I have spent so much time playing a role that it’s almost impossible for anyone to know who I really am,” he is heard saying, “and even for those I care about the most, I want it to be impossible.”

But if he did not want to be known, he certainly wanted to be seen. And that he was, building a career over seven decades as one of the most influential, most recognizable and all around most famous fashion designers of all time.

Karl, the new documentary from director Nick Hooker (AKA Mr. Chow), is a valiant effort to connect those dots, to find the creative human heart beneath the rigidly controlled image that the late designer projected in public. If the portrait it offers is ultimately too broad and too shallow to be definitive, it’s still an engaging look at a man whose influence will live on for decades to come.

Based on William Middleton’s Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld, this is a posthumous portrait of the designer, who died in 2019; Lagerfeld himself thus has contributed no exclusive interviews to the film. Instead, Hooker allows him to speak through undated archival photographs and footage, sketches he made for work or for play, and snippets of his own writing (some of it “recorded” in his voice via artificial intelligence). In a playful touch, animated sequences by Rohan Patrick McDonald — rendered in bold, simple lines reminiscent of Lagerfeld’s own drawings — bring to life experiences from the subject’s youth for which no pictures or videos are available.

The man Lagerfeld would have you believe he is is one who eschews emotions and intimacy in every form. He insists he’s not prone to jealousy or anger, though his hot-and-cold relationships with his long-term partner Jacques de Bascher (dramatized in the forgettable Hulu biopic Becoming Karl Lagerfeld) or his creative collaborator Inès de la Fressange suggest otherwise. He admits in interviews there have been times in his life when he hasn’t felt control, but if he expands on what those times are, we don’t hear them. What we do get is describing his own approach to dieting as “fascistic”: “There’s no discussion. There is an order, you follow it.”

Perhaps inevitably, given Lagerfeld’s reticence to get up close and personal, the movie’s portrayal of his psychology depends most heavily on interviews with the people who knew him best, including colleagues from Chanel, Fendi and Lagerfeld’s own eponymous line, and celebrity friends like Penelope Cruz and Lily-Rose Depp. They offer a touching sense of what he meant to those in his inner circle (some get visibly choked up talking about him), and a vaguer idea of what he meant to the culture at large. But they’re also slightly distancing, like hearing secondhand how awesome a friend of a friend is rather than just getting to meet them firsthand.

Unsurprisingly, the impression left by Karl is an overwhelmingly positive one, generous with praise and ginger with criticism. Acknowledgement is made of Lagerfeld’s tendency to make statements that got him in hot water — but the one example we’re given is so mild and indirect that a viewer who doesn’t remember the 2010s might wonder if he was really as controversial as his former PR person says he was. And while the film does touch upon one particularly disastrous collection from 1998, it’s just about the only career low mentioned in what is otherwise portrayed as a spotless run.

Karl is eager to get across how brilliant Lagerfeld was, how hard-working and creative and charming in his own way, and it mounts a persuasive case if not necessarily a profound one. Careful note is taken of its subject’s professional innovations: He was brought into Chanel at a time when younger designers taking over older houses wasn’t really a thing; he made the formerly staid house seem cool and sexy again; he was on the vanguard of high-low collabs with his capsule for H&M; he became such a celebrity in his own right that he even lent his voice to a Grand Theft Auto game in the 2000s.

But it’s vaguer when it comes to what made his designs so special. The designer Tom Ford is one of Karl’s most charismatic interviewees, but he conveys Lagerfeld’s impact more through personal enthusiasm (“The first few seasons of Chanel were STARTLING,” he gushes) than any deep cultural or artistic analysis. He has more insight to offer about what made Lagerfeld iconic as a public figure than about what made him brilliant as an artist, at least in the bits included in the documentary.

Meanwhile, Tilda Swinton effuses that Lagerfeld “so fully apprised with the dignity of women,” in a way that’s “not just about feminism, not about women, even, [but] about a kind of liberated spirit”; I wasn’t able to jot down the full quote, but rest assured it sounds just as much like word salad in the finished film.

Really, the best favor the documentary does itself in this regard is let Lagerfeld’s work shine on its own. It’s genuinely fascinating to hear a textile designer talk about translating the “grocery store” theme for one season by creating a dense red tweed to evoke the texture of raw meat, or to watch models in Barbie-esque outfits strut down the catwalk to “Short Dick Man.” One does not need to be a student of fashion to admire the extreme care that’s gone into designing and crafting these intricate garments, or to admire the way they move on the models, or to ooh and aah at the increasingly elaborate runways, or to simply admire how marvelous it all looks.

One might also not come away with much more than that. The life and work and lasting influence of Karl Lagerfeld is far too rich a subject to be covered in any comprehensive fashion over 110 minutes, and Karl functions more capably as a big-picture summary for those already inclined to admire him than as either a primer for total newbies or an in-depth analysis for the already knowledgeable.

Lagerfeld himself, meanwhile, comes in and out of focus — though perhaps that’s how he would have liked it. “I don’t want to be a reality in people’s lives. I want to be a fleeting presence, appearing and disappearing,” he says, in a continuation of the quote mentioned in the very first paragraph here. It maybe impossible to get truly close to a person who so fervently resisted letting anyone get close to him. But in capturing that elusiveness, the doc finds something that feels true all the same.