Bill Cunningham New York

A version of this review appeared in The Age, November 3, 2011.

Bill Cunningham is a friendly chap in a blue smock, who can often be seen cycling around Manhattan in search of strikingly dressed people to photograph for his “On the Street” column in the New York Times. Still boyish as he enters his ninth decade, he's a workaholic and a mystery man, his guileless manner at odds with his sophisticated eye. Like Andy Warhol, he presents himself as a recording machine, absorbing data without passing judgement; at the same time, he's nothing if not discriminating in his tastes.

Richard Press' documentary has some of the lightness and fleetness of Cunningham himself in old age, and isn't a minute too long. As a tribute to the city, it's often exhilarating; as a study of an individual, it's necessarily incomplete.  Cunningham knows everyone, but nobody quite knows him; though he's far more genial than the stand-offish Warhol, he finally seems an even more solitary figure. 

Near the end, Press politely urges him to reveal more about himself, but his uneasy responses don't wholly solve the puzzle – not that any single revelation could. At any rate, it's clear that Cunningham's personal life runs a distant second to his pursuit of beauty; in this sense, his speech to an admiring crowd in Paris, where he receives the Legion of Honour, tells us as much as we need to know.

As a fairy tale about class, the film is a little more suspect. Cunningham has worked out a way to exist with a minimum of fuss, but his is a very rarified form of the simple life: he lives in a tiny, rent-controlled studio in Carnegie Hall, and eats out every night at local cafes. Lauded by the likes of Anna Wintour, he's reluctant to see himself as an arbiter of style; shooting society events for the Times, he refuses on principle to touch the champagne. Still, he mixes as easily with the elite – Lady Astor was a friend – as he does with downtown drag queens or nobodies like you and me.

Social chronicler Tom Wolfe is on hand to explain that “New York is all about status,” implying Cunningham manages to rise above the struggle simply by not caring. It has to be more complicated than that. But we do believe him when he says that all that really interests him is the clothes.