Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, a big new show on Disney+, caught my roving, bitchy eye. It’s a lavish, expensive-looking, flouncing bit of Europudding about the early career of the German designer, and I’ll admit that at first I was hesitant — how much more do we need to be told about the unsettling Kaiser Karl? He’s been dead five years, yet only seems to get more famous. Every week there are more books, more interviews about him, documentaries — all delivered in the same tone: “Wasn’t Karl incredible, a legend?”
Would this be more of the same? Short answer is: not really.
For a start, Daniel Brühl is an inspired bit of casting: puppyish, bookish, giving off the distressed air of a mid-level accountant. It’s 1974, so Karl’s full look — black, stiff white Victorian collar, ponytail, dangly, corpsey trinkets, fans — hasn’t evolved yet, although he’s already stuffing himself into corsets and owns numerous tie pins, including a massive “K” brooch that he wears, like a creepy children’s entertainer, to a meeting at Chloé, where he’s head designer.
It’s made clear, in a series of well-plotted, subtle asides, that, far from the “genius” everyone hails him as now, he is not hugely talented: a stodgy, overeating underdog languishing in ready-to-wear. At best he produces flouncy, brightly coloured, sub-Cavalli “jester” gowns that Marlene Dietrich, arriving at a photoshoot for Vogue, angrily describes as “hässlich”.
Watch the trailer for Becoming Karl Lagerfeld
Yves Saint Laurent, by contrast, is a genius: Mozart to Lagerfeld’s Salieri. He’s 6ft tall, golden, so gets the show’s hottest actor and best wig. But he’s bored with fashion; in and out of lunatic asylums, a slave to drugs — of which Lagerfeld immediately takes advantage. If you want to watch several hours of two designers flinging marble busts and demanding “quails’ eggs”, amid wild disco costumes — and, well, I do — then this is a scream. As YSL Arnaud Valois has the time of his life strutting around naked, shagging younger lovers or getting arrested for having sex in the street.
Brühl, though, is the main attraction: he is brilliant as Lagerfeld connives, manipulates, leaks stories against his rival. The show is in French, but he also dips effortlessly in and out of German, English and Italian — why do so many actors have to speak so many languages now? It’s harder work than translating at the UN. What happened to just doing comedy accents? You almost root for Lagerfeld as, sweatily, he keeps all the plates spinning. Occasionally, amid the peculiar châteaux, fashion shows, high art and newspaper interviews, he will breathe: “I like anonymity.” And then he will go back to sketching some hideous Viennese cream cake, or prowling around at some fashion show, squabbling with YSL over Jacques de Bascher, Lagerfeld’s boyfriend. “You’re out of control, Jacques!” Lagerfeld howls. Soon enough de Bascher, a handsome aristocrat, repays Lagerfeld by having an affair with YSL.
Lagerfeld’s 19-year relationship with this “despicable” rake is the central story. I can’t for the life of me see why Lagerfeld was so obsessed with him, though — de Bascher was basically a monster: cruel, sexually incontinent, ungovernable, shown spitefully sleeping with many other men, whereas Lagerfeld doesn’t drink, lives with his mother and goes to bed at 10pm. But the designer bankrolled him, loved him, never (he claimed) had sex with him — and when he died of Aids in 1989 Lagerfeld cradled him in his arms.
It’s a gift of a role, easy to play — just a lot of shagging and pouting. They could have cast anyone. So why did they choose someone who looks nothing like the buff, burnished, cherubic de Bascher? Théodore Pellerin is tall, thin, limp, an emo — like Erin O’Connor, or a gendarme. He does not have the sort of body to carry off the pair of lederhosen with which de Bascher charmed Lagerfeld on their first date. It’s easily tuned out, but it’s a pity.
Throughout much of the show we are reminded that Lagerfeld’s family were Nazis. His father owned a factory where he employed “compulsory workers”. Sitting in a hairdresser, Lagerfeld’s mother overhears two French aristocrats calling her “Lagerfeld’s Nazi Mutter”. If you look at any other television shows you will see it again and again: the Nazi villains in Doctor Who and Marvel; the endless costume fantasies, romances etc set before, during and just after the war. The war is modern Britain’s origin story; it is our Ring cycle. I’m glad it’s still so discussed and obsessed over, when slowly, year by year, the voices are trickling away.
D-Day: The Unheard Tapes (BBC2) unveiled new interviews with men who took part in the landings. It seems amazing to me that, 80 years on, there remains material in the universe that hasn’t been combed through, pored over or even listened to, but apparently these voices have been hidden in “private collections” and “museums”. We heard how some of these men flew behind enemy lines, silently, in gliders, in which they essentially had to crash, then immediately evacuate and face action. Imagine having to take a bridge just after you’d suffered a plane crash. On the beaches “the ramp went down, your asshole puckered up”, one GI said. Eventually, “the water was red with blood”.
I must say I could have taken these evocative interviews on their own, playing, almost, in darkness. What they say just doesn’t get any less gripping. But whoever put this incredible show together didn’t think that was enough, because we had actors, dressed up, lip-syncing the words, along with historians explaining the words, and footage on top of that showing us what the words meant, and where. I don’t mind the historians and the footage, but did we need so many stick-on moustaches? I find them distracting, and it says a lot about what the show thinks about its audience.
Watch the trailer for Queenie
I nearly didn’t get round to Queenie, an eight-part series on Channel 4. But then I thought, oh, I’ll pop one, and then I popped another, and suddenly I’d done the lot. I loved it. Queenie is a Jamaican-British girl from south London, played by Dionne Brown. As far as I can see Brown has only done eight episodes of TV before this, but she’s a complete natural and acts as if she’s been the lead on Sex and the City for decades.
She’s a Carrie Bradshaw, of course; her friends are, variously, Charlotte, Samantha, etc — you can pick them out. She’s trying to get over her last boyfriend, her “ivory king”, Tom, a guy, to be honest, I’d literally never place her with, in a drama that is hilarious/filled with improbabilities, ridiculous bits of girl-boss dialogue, and stuff left over from 2020/other people’s novels. But blinding, hard reality isn’t the point of it at all. It’s charming.
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