Andrew Rossi did a fine job of outlining journalistic operations and pressures in Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011) and a thorough dissection of third-level education in America in Ivory Tower (2013).
The rigour displayed by those films makes this maddeningly unfocused fashion documentary all the more puzzling.
Roaming scenes and random sequences touch upon the death of designer Alexander McQueen, a visit to Jianfu Palace, and Vogue relocating to new offices at World Trade One: "This is making me violently ill," says proprietor Anna Wintour, of a disfavoured wall installation.
Prepare for the reality-TV "we'll never be finished on time" finish. First Monday in May follows curator Andrew Bolton as he puts together the 2015 exhibition 'China: Through the Looking Glass' at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
While he pores over fabrics and Anna Mai Wong movies, sorting the Chinese from the chinoiserie, across town, Wintour and her Vogue cohorts are preparing the Met Gala.
The vexing spadework for that shindig, and the event itself, provide a few deliciously gossipy moments for fans of celebrity porn: "Josh Hartnett? What has he done lately?" sneers one of the table place organisers; Rihanna demands $200,000 to perform at what is, after all, a charity event; Amal Clooney flounces past Vogue's talismanic former editor-at-large, André Leon Talley, without so much as a blink.
The competing strands remain just that. Scenes of board meetings – at which consultant filmmaker Wong kar-wai says not a dickie – swerve the film into the painstaking terrain of Fred Wiseman’s slow-docs only to switch quickly back to the most annoying trope of the contemporary fashion doc: everybody calling everyone else a genius.
Anna is “beyond legacy”, gushes Baz Luhrmann, obligingly. There is plenty of unintentional comedy in the hyperbole and inanity: “Fashion is about ideas,” we are told. “It’s not exclusively about the West appropriating Chinese symbols,” Andrew Bolton explains to a journalist with concerns about orientalism; Wintour, doing her best Wintour, stares the questioner down.
Fun viewing for fashionistas, to be sure.
