by Julian Wood
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Dame Lesley Lawson, Dustin Hoffman, Paul McCartney, Charlotte Tilbury, Joanna Lumley, Sienna Miller
Intro:
… a nice little film about a very nice person.
Paul Simon famously wrote that ‘every generation throws a hero up the pop charts’ and he knew a thing or two about fame and the passage of time. This line can come back to haunt one sometimes, when you think of how much churn and burn there is in the world of popstar fame. Also, somehow it all seems to be accelerating, as more and more ways of ‘making it’ (influencers, tiktokkers etc) crowd the space.
A while back, models became super models, and we became used to the idea that beautiful young women (mostly women) who could walk in a straight line were suddenly not just clothes horses but feted as ‘stars’, who then became household names. There is an edge of insanity here and this documentary by actress turned filmmaker Sadie Frost, communicates the hectic delirium. The eponymous subject of her film is Twiggy, who is an early paradigm case for these trajectories.
As we learn, Twiggy (nee Lesley Hornby) was an ‘ordinary’ (read: working class) teenager growing up in Neasden. This was a suburb of London so unfashionable that the 1960s English satirical magazine Private Eye took it as a metonym for terminal dead zone obscurity.
Still, Twiggy and her sisters and her loving parents were perfectly happy there. She tells us that she had a happy childhood and though “we knew we were working class, we never felt we wanted for anything”.
When self-styled ‘man about town’ Justin de Villeneuve [a fabulous piece of self-invention right there] noticed the 15-year-old’s beauty, he made a bee-line for her. It sems like a bit of a Svengali relationship (not to say one that today we would describe as based on grooming). He gave her a soon-much-copied boy cut and put her in front of some famous photographers. As the cliché goes, the rest is history. Twiggy certainly was catapulted. Within a year or so, she was flying to New York and Paris and hobnobbing with endless rock stars.
Lots of these famous names are here as talking heads, recalling how sweet she was. Equally-elfin David Bowie was launching from a slightly similar background, and he formed an instant bond with Twiggy. When he wrote her into the song ‘Drive in Saturday’, Twiggy flipped out and went and bought all the records she could to share with her family.
The doco doesn’t really break much new ground, but it is surprising in another way; that there hasn’t been a good film about her before. Visually, it is fun too, with all the colour and clothes and hairstyles. The shots of London in the swinging sixties, for example, retain their charm.
There are some light touches of feminist criticism featuring mates like Joanna Lumley, who recalls the sexism of early modelling gigs. (The male interviewers who grilled Twiggy or leched after her do look pretty awful in today’s light). Twiggy (in her 70s now) has long since retired to cultivate her garden. She seems a bit baffled by all the fuss to this day, and she offers some self-mocking commentary on it all.
This is a nice little film about a very nice person. What’s wrong with that?
