'Iris': Fine line between bag lady and belle

'Less is more" is not Iris Apfel's credo. The irrepressible star of Albert Maysles' perfectly tuned documentary, Iris, is a nonagenarian New Yorker who shares her capacious Park Avenue apartment with a loving husband and room upon room of objets and mementos, couture and costume jewelry, shoes and stuffed toys, great art and great pieces of junk.

On any given day, she is wearing a good ton or two of her baubles and beads, belts and bags - this is not a person who could sneak up on you, ninja-style. You'd hear her pinging and percussing a mile away.

But Apfel is a person to whom arbiters of fashion - editors, photographers, designers, bloggers, socialites, swells - look for inspiration. There's a fine line between bag lady and belle of the ball, and Apfel instinctively knows it. Her sense of style is uncanny. She goes her own way, wears clothes her own way, accessorizes her own way, and everyone - including the veteran documentarian Maysles - looks on admiringly.

Iris is an absolute kick, whether or not you care a whit about the world this character is moving through. And she is a character, with her big round glasses and her big opinions. The film offers a potrait of a free-thinking woman who wore jeans before women were supposed to wear jeans, and who ran a textile and decorating business - with her husband, Carl - that served nine first families in the White House. Apfel is as comfortable seated front-and-center at the spring and fall runway shows as she is bargaining with a vendor of African trinkets on a Harlem sidewalk.

The portrait that emerges in Iris is one of a woman fortunate enough to have made a living (a very nice living, thank you) doing what she loves, a woman of independence still happily dependent on her (older, frailer) spouse, a woman eager to pass along what she knows to a new generation. Her talks to a class of University of Texas students are the opposite of haughty - she's engaged, informed, ready with a snappy, self-effacing joke or two.

Iris is doubly powerful because Maysles, a friend of Apfel's, can be heard offering off-camera questions. He even pops up in the frame once or twice; there's a pleasing dynamic between the director and his subject. Mayles, whose Grey Gardens captured a couple of other extremely colorful women living amid grand heaps of stuff, died in March. Iris was his penultimate film and his presence in it, albeit fleeting, adds a note of poignancy and loss to an ebullient affair.

Directed by Albert Maysles. With Iris Apfel, Carl Apfel, Bruce Weber, Tavi Gevinson, and others. Distributed by Magnolia Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 18 mins.

Parent's guide: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes).

Playing at: Ritz Bourse.EndText

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@Steven_Rea