Showing the shades of the man

In his elegant documentary “Lagerfeld Confidential,” Rodolphe Marconi attempts to reveal the man behind fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s signature dark glasses. It’s not an easy task, for Lagerfeld, who revived the house of Chanel 25 years ago, is dedicated to preserving his privacy as a way of sustaining an intriguing image. Yet Lagerfeld understands that, having agreed to make the film, he has to reveal something of himself if it is to hold an audience’s attention.

Throughout the time Marconi recorded Lagerfeld’s hectic schedule of fashion shows, travels and gala events, Lagerfeld maintained firm control of how he wanted himself presented, yet it is clear that Marconi earned his trust. As determined as he is to remain ultimately an enigma, Lagerfeld gives the viewer a good idea of his beliefs, ideas and values. He has a distinct look, wearing his silver hair in a ponytail, favoring white shirts with very high collars and dark suits offset with lots of jewelry. He was born in Germany to affluent parents in 1938 -- or maybe it was 1933, as his late cousin claimed, much to Lagerfeld’s outrage.

He is self-admittedly arrogant, and his ruthlessness in eliminating people who have outlived their usefulness from his businesses and his life is legendary. (He says that the sword of Damocles should hang over every relationship). He is unsentimental but has a mordant wit, and not a little charm.

Marconi clearly realizes that the image Lagerfeld so deliberately projects and that he captures so effectively is one of solitariness -- no matter how much time he spends amid crowds of people. Asking Lagerfeld if it is possible for anyone to know him, “It’s a difficult question,” Lagerfeld acknowledges. “I don’t want to be a reality in other people’s lives but an apparition. I appear, I disappear. And I don’t want people to be a reality in my life. That’s the secret.”

-- Kevin Thomas

“Lagerfeld Confidential.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes. Exclusively at the Grande 4-Plex, Figueroa Street at 3rd Street, Downtown L.A., (213) 617-0268.

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Nod to blue-collar Hollywood

Plenty of films pay tribute to Old Hollywood; “Man in the Chair” sets itself apart with a tip of the fedora not to glamour and scandal but to cinema’s working-class brethren. As the bellicose onetime gaffer at the center of the story, Christopher Plummer sheds his usual on-screen elegance and breathes life into crotchety-old-codger cliches. For all its scruffiness and clumsy charm, though, this independent feature travels a formulaic path toward a predictably heart-tugging conclusion.

Plummer’s Glen “Flash” Madden worked on “Citizen Kane,” but he’s now a ghost in the city, wandering its desolate corners with a bottle of Wild Turkey. A regular haunt is the Beverly Cinema, where his scathing, booze-fueled taunts to Charlton Heston in “Touch of Evil” catch the appreciative attention of a teenage film geek, Cameron Kincaid (Michael Angarano).

In by-the-numbers fashion, Cameron breaks through Flash’s armor and enlists his help in making a short film for a scholarship competition. The boy’s vague notion of a skateboard story morphs into something far weightier after Flash introduces him to Mickey Hopkins, a former A-list screenwriter who’s living in nursing-home squalor. Played with heartbreaking gentleness by M. Emmet Walsh, Mickey dusts off his manual typewriter to script the galvanized Cameron’s docudrama about elder abuse and neglect. Robert Wagner makes a brief but memorable appearance as the tennis-sweater-debonair producer who bankrolls the project.

Though they can’t transcend writer-director Michael Schroeder’s pointed contrivances, the actors tap into something achingly true in this valentine to Hollywood’s below-the-line crafts people and society’s castoffs.

-- Sheri Linden

“Man in the Chair.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for language and thematic elements. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes. At the Laemmle Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869; Laemmle One Colorado, 42 Miller Alley, Pasadena, (626) 744-1224; Laemmle Town Center, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 981-9811; Regency Theatres Paseo Camarillo, 390 N. Lantana St., Camarillo, (805) 383-2267.