This was riveting, jaw-dropping, moving and depressing. Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen of Versailles about the time-share mogul building the largest house in America - which in the course of the filming, was hit by the financial crash and came, both literally and metaphorically, tumbling down, was my first encounter with the film-maker who has made her reputation as an unsparing observer of the ultra-wealthy - but not for purely voyeuristic reasons (although there is of course an element of that, just by virtue of her subject matter) as she can get people to talk with often painful honesty about themselves and does not (excessively) use technique/mocking juxtapositions/personal commentary as a means of making her points. She allows her subjects to speak for themselves, often to condemn themselves but she also seems to be able to lead them to a greater degree of self-awareness than they previously had.
The trigger for this film was a retrospective exhibition that provides the climax of the film as well as some personal soul-searching and looking back by the creator herself.
The film initially seemed as if it was just going to be about the vagaries of conspicuous consumption which has been the central focus of her work but as it unfolded we realise that this is only a part of it and it is a much about obsessions in various forms (often but not wholly) material. Workaholism was/is a major element and as the film progressed we realised that Lauren herself was a classic example of this particular obsession - and her often painful interviews with her own children (her oldest son saying that ‘the damage had already been done’ in the early years of his childhood with her frequent and lengthy absences from home) and her own (divorced) mother who moved away from the family home to focus more on her career. The child is indeed father to the man (or wife). And it was fascinating that when she was interviewing her mother (an anthropologist) how often she (the mother) initially evaded questions by throwing them back at Lauren and pointing out how Lauren now embodied those aspects and elements that she wanted her own mother to talk about and acknowledge.
But she did not focus solely on the more 1%’er people (like the German Hedge Fund manager in refuge in Germany being wanted still by the FBI for fraud) - who did seem to have a degree of self-awareness – although not quite as much as his son; the traumatic and tragic effect on the children of these sort of people was one of the most powerful and moving aspects of this film. For all of them though, while it may often be measured in financial terms (and the majority of people featured did fall into that category), in one way ‘wealth’ was not the best term – it was obsessions above all that they were chasing – yes money and possessions as the most obvious, but other forms as well – an obsession with one’s body and body shape, an obsession with fertility and child bearing (after this had been put in second place to the woman’s high-flying career). The film-maker herself commented on how many similarities she observed between many of the subjects of this film and those with eating disorders – the focus of some of her earlier work.
So a riveting piece of work and sadly illuminating.