Logline: A young woman is plucked from obscurity to become the muse of the worlds greatest fashion designer.
The world is at war and staring down the barrel of a long nuclear winter with jobs, food and money all hard to come by. Fashion, with it’s obvious ostentation and sexual freedom, are frowned upon, even punished, and clothes are being torn from peoples bodies on the streets and burned for fear of radiation poisoning. With conscription about to be brought in society is crumbling and folk’ll do whatever it takes to get by.
DOLL, who everyone believes is a transvestite, works at a nightclub as a coat-check girl. It’s not much but it’s something and she’s good at her job because she doesn’t know where the next one will come from. JONNI is a dresser for CELESTINE the acknowledged world’s best fashion designer. He has a good job but he feels the designs are outdated, out of touch with the real world and with what’s happening on the street and while he’s there he works on his own designs and dreams of going it alone. Celestine is a recluse, believed to be hideously disfigured he hides himself away and conducts business using tarot cards and voicing instructions through MADAME D and MADAME S, the public faces of the fashion house.
One night Doll is working as usual and Jonni shows up, cocky and smart-mouthed, and verbally abuses Doll so she contrives to have him miss out on getting into the club. Later, while her back is turned, Jonni throws all the carefully organised coats on the floor, removes all the ticket stubs and in the resulting chaos Doll is fired from her job. Walking home she hears that Celestine is holding an open call for mannequins for his new fashion line. Doll goes for a job and during the audition a rap on the smoked glass overlooking the catwalk marks her out as chosen by Celestine himself. Doll is sent to get a new outfit by Madame S and Madame D where she again meets Jonni and again he abuses her so when his back is turned she high-tails out of the building wearing thousands of dollars worth of high-fashion gown hoping to get Jonni sacked in retaliation for for doing it to her. She doesn’t get very far before she is accosted by a picket-line of women protesting the whole fashion industry charade of waste and wealth and they beat her and tear the dress to pieces.
She is found by Jonni who is running through the streets desperate to find the dress and save his job. With the tattered garment barely covering her anymore, Jonni realises that Doll is, in fact, a girl but berates her about the state of the dress, the recriminations that Celestine will exact and how their lives could be in danger. Heedless of his warnings, Doll goes back to the fashion house and in a strange twist he makes her his principal model on a huge salary and benefits. Madame S, Madame D and Jonni are all aghast but Celestine rules with an iron fist so they have to obey. As Celestine’s new muse Doll spends more time with him although he always stays in the shadows, not showing his face. One day she plucks up the courage and asks to see his face and when he relents she realises that he is actually a beautiful man but she cannot tell him. She speaks to Madame S and Madame D and they tell her that his mother gave him doctored mirrors when he was young and he has grown up believing he is ugly but they – nor she – cannot tell him because this quest for beauty is what makes him the success he is. Thereafter Doll’s rise to fame is fast and relentless. She appears on magazines and billboards and her attitude slowly changes to match her new found status. She steals ideas from Jonni which leads to a huge fight and starts talking down to people trying to force their respect until she is picked up on it one day and decides to take a time out and visit her old home and the club where she worked.
While out she meets Jonni and agrees to take a tour of the old neighbourhood with him. he points out the vibrancy and sexual tension in the street fashions, telling her that Celestines layered, tailored, covered-up look of austerity is out-dated and needs to go and he is the man to change things. She argues with him, she has a new-found fondness for Celestine and doesn’t want things to change. She leaves Jonni and returns to the fashion house but finds Celestine in the last death throws of suicide. He has had enough of his gilded cage and his ugliness and he cannot think of another way out. He leaves the fashion house to Jonni, happy in the knowledge that Jonni will destroy Celestine’s legacy and create his own new era of open and free-thinking fashion. Madame S and Madame D contrive to have Jonni conscripted after the funeral and carry on as they were but Doll engineers his demob and he returns to take up his inheritance. His first fashion collection is a huge shock to the industry, ending in the kind of riot not seen since Celestine’s first show many years ago. Jonni and Doll go upstairs to celebrate, but when Jonni takes a look at himself in Celestine’s old mirror, echoes of the man Celestine became start to manifest themselves in Jonni.
I’m not sure where to start with this script, but basically it’s pretty dreadful. At 177 pages it’s a monster and given that it’s full of spelling and grammatical errors, it’s not formatted properly and it has pages and pages of camera direction and story notes – including a huge spoiler part way through – it must be a first draft, but I don’t think it could be rescued by any number of re-writes. Based very obviously on the old Beauty and the Beast fairytale and by all accounts from a story by Robert Boykin, an NYC nightclub impresario (apparently) and Malcolm McLaren, infamous manager of punk band the Sex Pistols, it’s a not very interesting idea that’s just poorly thought through and badly written. Now my understanding is that it was written sometime in the early 1980′s when Moore still thought that putting his ideas on the big screen might be a good idea and the project was instigated by McLaren who persuaded Moore to write the screenplay. Moore agreed, partly as a way of mastering the form, and partly because McLaren was a self-made man and Moore felt some kind of empathy with him, but this is not close to Moore’s best work and you have to wonder how much actually cam from him and how much came from that itinerant tinkerer, McLaren.
It does contain some Moore influence, most obviously the questions about identity, the use of masks, the the eulogising of youth culture and urban art and of course the threat of nuclear war and the fascist state but the 1980′s were a lot different to the world we live in now and, in all honesty, I can’t remember them being as bad as all that anyway. There are some nice touches, the reveal of the masculine ‘Beauty’ Doll as a woman rather than a transvestite man is a nice (albeit earlier) reversal on the Crying Game and the presentation of the Jonni as very feminine make the two opposites attract on several levels. Celestine as the reclusive ‘Beast’, driven to hide himself away by his mother who brainwashed him into believing he we too hideous to be seen by other humans, is not so convincing. His adherence to tarot (seen as inserts throughout the script) in running his empire and the use of only a single, distorting mirror doesn’t ring true for someone as supposedly in control as he is and in fact the use of his ‘hideousness’ would have been a better tool to enact tyranny over the workers. Of course that would ruin the reveal of his actual beauty but still, it’s too ‘clever clever’ to work.
I liked the idea of Celestine covering his models in more and more layers of clothing, restricting actual physical contact and repressing sexuality as a way of coping with his own perceived ugliness. There is a decent scene where Doll undresses in a totally unsexy way in front of him and then as he dresses her the gradual covering-up builds enormous sexual tension between them in a nice twist on the idea of the sex scene.
But it’s not enough. The backdrop of war, the threat of conscription and a nuclear winter are never fully realised and I can’t help thinking that Moore’s own obsession with these themes put them in there rather than any real need to drive the story. What he does do is present the fashion world in reasonably realistic terms with high gloss polish at the front and worker bees hidden at the back but the banner-waving political messages are like a hammer over the head and while you can skip over them in a comic book you can’t do that as easily with a screenplay which makes the reading very hard work indeed. Finally, it has to be said that while some visual flair could see this world work on the big screen, finding actors to bring it to life – or who would even want to – would be hard work, none of the players are particularly sympathetic and the work as a whole just lacks depth.
My rating?
[X] PASS
[ ] CONSIDER
[ ] RECOMMEND