A dishwater-dull film about an electric subject, Whitney Sudler-Smith's documentary about the rise and fall of designer Halston has everything it needs for success. There's an iconoclastic, paradigm-shifting artist who's also an aggressive businessman, dozens of fashion icons and hangers-on willing to peddle their stories, and a backdrop of cocaine-dusted and sex-scented Studio 54 decadence. The makings are all there for a glamorous documentary that could combine the wicked appeal of Billy Corben's Pater Gatien biopic Limelight with the more serious fashion-nerd leanings of something like The September Issue. But instead of letting his story naturally unfold like one of Halston's famous shirtwaist dresses, Sudler-Smith gums up the works by inserting his own stiff self front and center in one of the most ill-considered framing devices ever used in a documentary.
Ultrasuede is ostensibly about Halston, one of the first American designers to not only be serious competition for Europe's haute-couture clique but also a widely-known personality in the domestic mainstream. For reasons unknown, Sudler-Smith begins the film in impossibly awkward fashion, rambling about his love of the 1970s and cultural touchstones like Smokey and the Bandit. Wanting to use Halston as his gateway to explore New York in the 1970s (a place whose experience of that decade was of course wholly different than the country milieu of Smokey, but never mind), Sudler-Smith shoots himself tooling around in a black Trans Am, wearing a variety of wacky period hairdos. It's the 1970s by way of the Beastie Boys video for "Sabotage," and is even less funny and more confusing than it sounds.
A couple of very stilted interviews follows with people like Halston best friend Liza Minnelli and Vogue editor / walking fashion database Andre Leon Talley. The two of them try to give some broad picture of Halston the man (Minnelli) and Halston the designer (Talley), bucking Sudler-Smith's awkward demeanor and apparent lack of knowledge about his subject. Once the film gets past this rocky start, it is able to deliver the rough outlines of the story that should have been interesting enough, were the filmmaker to get out of its way.
