‘Be interesting, be amusing or be silent,” Karl Lagerfeld’s mother told him when he was a child. The makers of Becoming Karl Lagerfeld (Disney+) should really have gone for option three, because this biopic fails to be interesting and doesn’t even try to make us laugh. It’s not as if they’re short of material.
To anyone outside the world of fashion, Lagerfeld was absurd. In his later years he stuck so rigidly to one silhouette – primped white ponytail, starched collar and dark glasses – that you could buy the look as a Hallowe’en costume. His cat had two maids.
The title of Becoming Karl Lagerfeld suggests that it will chart how the designer we meet in the first episode – the year is 1972 – transformed into this caricature. But it doesn’t, not least because the series ends in the early 1980s when he gets a job at Chanel.
Instead, it tries to humanise him. As played by Daniel Brühl, Lagerfeld is insecure. He lives with his mother and watches with envy as his rivals – most notably Yves Saint Laurent – enjoy greater success. Underneath his suits, he is laced uncomfortably into a corset. “I don’t have this body, nor this size,” he tells Marlene Dietrich. “If people saw me as I am, they’d pass me by.”
Over the series, his fashion star rises as he takes the helm at Chloé. But we are never given any sense of why he was regarded as a fashion genius, nor why Lagerfeld and YSL’s right-hand man, Pierre Bergé, were such enemies. The focus of the drama (mostly in French) is Lagerfeld’s relationship with Jacques de Bascher, a beguiling young dandy who is also sleeping with Saint Laurent.
The decadent Bascher throws himself into drugs and clubbing, in contrast to the uptight Lagerfeld. The relationship is never consummated, which is as frustrating for the viewer as it is for the parties involved, because Lagerfeld is clearly in love and the reasons for his self-imposed loneliness are not adequately explained.
Despite efforts to make Lagerfeld’s world seem glamorous – with slow-mo shots – he is a lumpen presence next to the dazzling Bascher, and it is Canadian actor Théodore Pellerin who steals the show as the younger man.