Reaching an advanced age in and of itself is no great achievement. But living the golden years with brio, purpose and creativity is a feat that deserves to be celebrated.
That’s the ethos and appeal of the vibrant documentary “Iris,” which shakes out as an homage to elderly Jewish icons on both sides of the camera. A portrait of the 93-year-old New York interior designer, collector, model and fashion maverick Iris Apfel, the film also serves as a eulogy to its director, Albert Maysles, the cinema verité pioneer who died in March at 88.
If that sounds like a recipe for self-congratulation and self-indulgence, you don’t know Iris and Albert. They’re much too preoccupied with today’s to-do list to waste precious time loitering over past triumphs or honors.
“Iris” opens May 8 at Bay Area theaters following its screenings in the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Coincidentally, the Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival, organized by local filmmaker David L. Brown and highlighting 16 documentaries and various guests, takes up residence at the Vogue Theatre in San Francisco for a week beginning the same day “Iris” opens.
The film introduces its anything-but-shy subject modeling a couple of her vivid ensembles for Albert’s camera, accessorized to the hilt with multiple bracelets and necklaces. She has no rules, she tells us. If it works, it works.
What she does have, we come to realize, is style and taste. Admittedly, it’s an advantage to be able to mix and match impeccably crafted designer pieces made from top-drawer materials, but let’s be honest: Very few people could pull off Iris’ iconoclastic combos. (Or her cartoonishly oversize glasses with the black frames.)
Consciously integrating wearable art into her everyday life, Iris embodies the spirit of freedom. By extension, her flamboyant approach gives everyone on the street permission to go a bit further out on the limb.
It takes a certain confidence — or indifference to what people think — to dress and live that way, but thankfully Iris is neither dogmatic nor conceited. That’s what makes it so much fun (a word she uses a lot) hanging out with her.
She is who she is, and has no problem accepting it. Asked about plastic surgery, she dispatches the notion with a couple of incisive insights and a pithy one-liner, “Some very important people I know, they come out looking like Picasso.”
Albert’s films unfold in the present, so he doesn’t explore his subject’s Jewish background. The only insight we get into her upbringing is that her mother went back to work when Iris was 11 and she felt so abandoned that she decided never to have children lest they resent her for putting her career first.
Iris and husband Carl got into interior design after the war and started a company called Old World Weavers that obtained quality fabrics and furnishings from around the globe for their high-level clientele. How exclusive were they? Let’s just say the couple did work for every White House from Truman through Clinton. (It’s too bad Iris cuts Carl off when he starts to dish about Jackie Kennedy.)
The business supported a Park Avenue lifestyle and Iris’ endless shopping expeditions. One of the film’s highlights is a visit to their storage loft — loft, not locker — that evokes the breadth of Carl and Iris’ decades of travels and purchases. They ought to offer tours of the place.
Near the end of the film, Iris observes, “Most of the world is not with me, but I don’t care.” She’s referring to her unwillingness to be impressed by prettiness in other people, but she could be talking about practically anything.
Iris exudes the joy of marching to her own drummer, but she makes no bones that her path — or fashion in general — are for everyone.
“It’s better to be happy than well dressed,” she declares at one point. As with every other pearl of wisdom Iris drops, we know she means it.
“Iris” opens May 8 at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, Shattuck in Berkeley and Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. (Unrated, 78 minutes)