LOVE, CECIL

UK, 2017, 98 minutes, Colour.
Narrated by Rupert Everett.
Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland.


This is both a biography and portrait of celebrated photographer, artist, designer, Cecil Beaton.

The audience is able to get an overall picture of his life, his birth in England in 1904, his relationship with his parents, the severe business father, loving mother, two sisters and then a brother, Reggie (who, later, suicided). The film traces his school experiences, his interest in drama and theatre, going to Cambridge, avoiding all lectures, again becoming involved in theatre and design.

In his mid-20s, he travelled to New York, bringing his sketches and designs, as well as his skills in photography which he had been developing for some years. Photographing celebrities in his unique style, always the unexpected, he is employed by some of the fashion magazines including Vogue. During the 1930s he travelled annually to the United States building up his reputation, both in England and in the United States and internationally. There is a difficulty when, unwittingly he uses the word ‘kike’ in an article and is accused of anti-Semitism and blackballed.

Professionally idle for a year and a half, he is saved by the outbreak of World War II, hired to photograph the troops, action, his travelling widely as far as Asia, building up quite a portfolio of striking war photographs.

During his life he produced quite a number of books of his photos, designs, and showing his talent for intelligent and clever writing. He also published many diaries.

At the opening of the film, there is an indication of his success with My Fair Lady, the Ascot sequence, doing designs and costumes for its theatrical performances and then for the film itself, winning two Oscars. Previously he had won an Oscar for his design for Gigi and then was to design for Barbra Streisand, On a Clear Day You can see Forever. He also designed for a number of theatre productions.

Beaton was gay, the film showing the different men with whom he was involved, loving them, but breaking with them. The narration indicates that he could be an acerbic personality. His joviality and his sharpness are commented on by a number of talking heads, including photographer, David Bailey, and artist, David Hockney. Andy Warhol also makes an appearance.

Narration makes much of Beaton’s homes, his favourite acquired in the 1930s but seconded by the military during World War II, then his second home, beautiful and isolated in the countryside.

The narration and the quotations from his rather voluminous diaries, all published eventually, is by Rupert Everett, who is able to deliver with a rather Edwardian tone as well as overtones of his performances as Oscar Wilde and in Oscar Wilde’s plays and films.

One of the continued interests and delights of the film is the succession, an enormous range in fact, of Beaton’s photographs over the decades. They are always striking in his use of light and darkness, shadow, angles, unexpected backgrounds and designs.

While Cecil Beaton may not have been always engaging to meet, he left an enormous heritage, photography, design and costumes.

He died in 1980.