And the filmmakers make wise editing choices that allow viewers to ask their own questions and perhaps harbor reservations about the documentary’s admirable protagonist. That doesn’t mean she was always there for her son those early years, the film makes clear. Thinking back on the partying scene of the 1970s, NYC culture maven Fran Lebowitz remarks that Hardison was different because she had a kid she had to be grown. Hardison - who made his own kind of history playing Black college student Dwayne the late-’80s sitcom “A Different World” - makes several more telling and touching appearances in the documentary. The best and wittiest might be the snippet that comes about five minutes into the film when Hardison asks, “How do you see the film starting?” It already has.Īnother differently clever wink comes from actor Kadeem Hardison: “I first met Bethann…” he begins, before talking about his loving and complicated feelings for his dynamic mother. Recordings of some of the filmmakers’ phone exchanges are included. It is decidedly, if wryly playful at others. This is not Tcheng’s first rodeo: He directed “Dior and I,” “Halston” and “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel.” But this collaboration with Hardison makes the weft and warp of the personal and the cultural into something that could be called intersectional at times. “Activism has to remain active,” says Hardison late in the film.
#ADAGIO DAZZLE DOLL REVIEW PROFESSIONAL#
(Mia Cioffi Henry and Tcheng are the directors of cinematography.) Yet, anchored by a discerning approach that mixes the gifts of an advertising art director with the inquiring intellect of a sophisticated documentarian, it flows gracefully from the personal to the professional and back again and again as if to argue one of the documentary’s most salient points: Systemic change requires a never-ending activism, a vigilance and a generosity of spirit. The film’s visual stylishness shouldn’t come as a surprise. The filmmakers do something similar with a gathering Hardison called nearly two decades later when data made it clear that designers and their bookers were outright spurning models of color.
It’s made more so by rendering it in rich black-and-white. The footage of Iman, Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb, Roshumba Williams, Tyra Banks and Hardison flanking New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Mark Green as they held a press conference taking on the lack or representation in fashion ads in 1992 provides just one of the film’s indelible moments. Four years later, along with friend and supermodel Iman, she gathered models to unite as the Black Girl Coalition.
She was the first Black woman to open her own modelling agency in 1984.
She was one of the models at the legendary Battle of Versailles runway show in 1973. When there were shifts in how the fashion industry viewed models of color, Hardison was there as participant but more often catalyst.
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