Iris ★★★★★

Iris documentary: Albert Maysles
The late Albert Maysles' Iris follows the extraordinarily engaging artistic chemistry between ninety-three year old style icon Iris Apfel and Albert Maysles: documentary filmmaker, eighty-seven year old and director of The Gates, Grey Gardens and countless other films which employ the verité style (Gimme Shelter and Salesmen). Iris tells the tale of the force of creativity, and subtly explores the pair’s creative convergence.
Beginning in Apfel’s childhood, Albert Maysles' Iris shows us that Iris was never considered 'attractive' and indeed lacked confidence as a result. But as she soon discovered, she was found to possess something far more crucial and far less ephemeral: Iris had style.
Soon enough, Iris began to dominate the fashion world, changing the game of interior design with her ever-flamboyant style. ‘Colour can raise the dead’, Apfel exclaims, and one glance at her clothing in the film shows the resilience of her eccentricity. Indeed it was only in her later years that Apfel shot to fame as what she terms a ‘geriatric starlet’.
An exhibition in 2005 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York first brought her to the attention of an enthusiastic fashion crowd. Not that Apfel could care, she mourns modern style and bemoans that current designers ‘don’t even know how to sew’. This is a documentary then about style, age and creativity. Of the new documentary film releases out in London this summer, Iris promises to be as much a delight for the eyes as it is intellectually intriguing. If you watch anything come July, then, watch Iris Apfel documentary, Albert Maysles' warm exploration into the birth of a legend.