“Bill Cunningham New York” (2010)

Is the recipe for happiness doing just one thing well, to the exclusion of all other things?  If you take photographer Bill Cunningham at face value it would be easy to assume as much.  At age 80 Cunningham continues to do what he’s done pretty much every day since 1978: obsessively take snapshots of both the fashion runways of the world and the street culture of his native New York city.

“Bill Cunningham New York” is a documentary that chronicles Cunningham’s life and idiosyncratic work methods as he goes about the task of gathering images for his “New York Times” fashion page.  Though primarily a character study - and Cunningham’s is a character well worth studying - it also offers a fascinating insight into a social milieu of art and journalism, of cultures high and low.

Cunningham is a man utterly without artifice or snobbery.  He’s as comfortable at Parisian fashion shows as he is chatting to campy drag queens or hobnobbing with the Big Apple’s high society set.  Respected by one and all for his commitment and personal ethics, he breaks down social boundaries by simply ignoring them.

Ironies abound in Cunningham’s life.  A champion of extravagance and imagination in others, his personal style is modest and repetitive and he is indifferent to money.  Encouraging toward expressions of sexuality that challenge gender stereotypes, he himself lives an asexual existence that’s gently guided by an undemonstrative Catholic faith.  Working in a field of celebrity and superficiality, Cunningham rejects the cult of the famous and focuses exclusively on the fashion itself.

The filmmakers know enough to hang back and give Cunningham space to strut his stuff.  They save the personal, probing questions until the very last, when audience curiosity about what makes the man tick has reached boiling point.  It comes as quite a shock when, eventually, Cunningham’s guard comes down and he reveals himself in an unexpected way.

Intelligent use is made of an earlier documentary on Cunningham shot in the 1980s, stressing the consistency in the man’s vision and preoccupations.  There are also extensive, sometimes perceptive interviews with his peers and friends.  Editta Sherman, one of Cunningham’s fellow residents in the Carnegie Hall apartments where he resided for a half century, is a likely candidate for a documentary herself.  Then 96, sporting ridiculous wigs and/or hats of Cunningham’s own design, she is but one of the film’s many pleasures.