Review No.46: A Man's Story

Next in our documentary quest is the story of a man, as you could guess from that title, that man being tailor Ozwald Boateng with the title actually referring to the name of his 2010 show which ended London Fashion Week that year. But this is a film that spans twelve years of his life from becoming the youngest man to get a place on Saville Row to getting his OBE and everywhere in between. Usually on these reviews I'd run through a quick synopsis before getting to my views but here I will let you know what I learnt about the tailor:
1) He likes to talk about himself in the third person
2) He has his own reality show in America
3) The film starts with lots of famous people who wear his suits and throughout the film we learn that he styled Jamie Foxx when he won the Oscar with his other clients including Will Smith, Prince Charles and Richard Branson.
4) He married a Russian model and had two children with her. He tells the camera that he wants to stay with her forever so they later split up.
5) He organised a fashion show in Africa and he also works for Givenchy.

As you can imagine I didn't warm to Boetang sure he's done a lot of breaking through barriers due to his race and age becoming a tailor was a bit of a feat but we don't really see the vulnerable side of him so much. Apart from his divorce and his studio being robbed there's little for him to moan about and indeed there is a lot of bragging going on throughout. You could say that this is more of a ninety minute promotional video for a master-tailor who loves himself so much and would even consider designing a suit for The Queen. Over the years that director Varon Bonicos has been following Boetang around you'd think he'd have least talked about why he loves his craft and how he comes up with his designs but instead the theme here is the glory he gets and what he's suffered in order to get it. The scenes in which Boetang thinks his wife is cheating on him are also quite crudely done with the camera pointing right in her face accusing her of an affair are very intrusive indeed. At the end of the day what I'm saying is there's a lot more style than substance on show here and indeed this might be a case of a director getting too close and chummy with his subject in the years that he has been filming.

Verdict: A 90 minute promotional video for a man who essentially has it all while it's well-made its essentially vacuous so it only gets 3.5/10