[ SCATTER MY ASHES AT
BERGDORF'S screens Saturday
September 7th at 7:25 pm and Sunday September 8th at 4:00 pm at the
Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review by Bob Ignizio
Although billed as a documentary, SCATTER MY ASHES AT
BERGDORF'S is really more of a
long form advertisement, a love letter to the high end New York
department store Bergdof Goodman. And there is little if any attempt
to contextualize what the film shows us outside of the rarefied
bubble of fame, fortune, and fashion in which it exists.
Film producer Jean Doumanian
perhaps best sums up the underlying ideology at the heart of
SCATTER MY ASHES AT BERGDORF'S when interviewed in the film, saying, “If a young
girl is going to college she can't wait to become a lawyer or get a
full time job so she can buy that pair of shoes that she's been
looking at. Everyone wants to better themselves, so they aspire and I
think that's why stores like this are necessary. To make people want
to aspire to bigger and better things. You need this for the American
dream. For people to actually reach it, they have to see it.” That
there are plenty of people who subscribe to such a shallow and
materialistic version of the American dream is without question. Less
certain is whether that's as healthy a thing as Doumanian and the
many other luminaries from the worlds of fashion and entertainment
who are interviewed in SCATTER
MY ASHES AT BERGDORF'S seem to
believe it is.
Unfortunately director Matthew
Miele isn't the least bit interested in pursuing such questions. Nor does the film ever really
get below the surface of its subject on any level. It's well shot and
fairly exhaustive in the way it recounts all the many and varied
designers who have strived to get their collections into the store
and succeeded, and good for them. For
the casual viewer, though, even one with some interest in fashion, there's very little here of substance.
Perhaps the film will gain some ironic resonance when seen as a companion piece to Sophia Coppola's
THE BLING RING, also
playing the Cleveland Cinematheque this weekend. One can certainly
imagine the protagonists of Coppola's film watching SCATTER
MY ASHES AT BERGDORF'S almost
as a kind of porn. Either way, for many viewers watching this film will likely feel like watching a National Geographic special on some bizarre culture they can't relate to and don't particularly like. 2 out of 4 stars.
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