Eleven Minutes

Directed by Michael Selditch, Robert Tate, 2008
Cast: Jay McCarroll.

By Alyce Wilson

Eleven Minutes premiered at the Philadelphia Film Festival, partly because the filmmakers, Michael Seiditch and Rob Tate, along with the subject, fashion designer Jay McCarroll, have ties to Philadelphia. The filmmakers, as well as McCarroll, introduced the film and held a small fashion show afterwards.

The film chronicles the work and the set-backs that led to McCarroll's first runway show at New York's Fashion Week, a couple years after winning Bravo's Project Runway.

As the film makes clear, McCarroll's iconoclastic approach to the fashion world values artistic inspiration and principles over playing by the rules. This has meant that, while many young designers would be happy to pimp themselves to any high-fashion magazine, regardless of what appeared in its pages, McCarroll has spoken out against the use of fur. In fact, his first runway show was sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States and included no animal products.

Likewise, he dislikes the emphasis on super-skinny models, preferring his fashions to be shown on woman with "real curves," a preference that leads to arguments with his marketing director.

Clearly, McCarroll loves the process of converting inspiration into creation. The business aspects, however, often frustrate and annoy him. In response, he makes light of the system and himself, with the off-beat humor that had previously endeared him to Bravo viewers.

Despite McCarroll's entertaining patter, the film drags in the middle, as he and his team cope with problem after problem. The film's fly-on-the-wall perspective stays almost exclusively on McCarroll, seemingly in real-time, as he becomes increasingly frustrated. Those scenes could have been condensed through editing, and the film could have benefitted through interviews with some of the other principles involved in the story, for a more complete view of the process.

Even so, the film is an interesting exploration of the intersection between art and the business world in American society.

Rating: *** (Good)

Philadelphia Film Festival 2008