Movie Nation

“Waldo on Weed” takes its title and its tone from its host and star.

Brian Dwyer starts the film as a media-savvy Philadelphia pizza entrepreneur, a thin ginger-bearded goofball who knew how to get attention for Brain Pizza, his landmark pizza paraphernalia-bedecked eatery, and for his big whopping baby.

Waldo James Mysterious Dwyer was over 13 pounds when he was born. Yeah, that made the local news.

But when Brian and wife Danielle’s little boy was diagnosed with retinal cancer at six months of age, Dad’s demeanor turns determined. And the giddy slice-of-life documentary becomes a years-long odyssey, documented via “dad-cam,” seeking treatment for their baby, hoping for a miracle, “smuggling drugs” cross country to put “Waldo on Weed.”

Dwyer maintains his affable, enthusiastic presence throughout. But as the journey from joy to worry, desperation to activism plunges on, he grows more subdued as the film progresses.

“Waldo on Weed” evolves into an upbeat story about a family, and a very little (OK, he started big) boy who have been through the wringer.

Talking directly to the camera, taking it into his (former) business, the OB-GYN, and then into doctor’s offices, chemo and everywhere else the movie goes, Dwyer narrates “Waldo” as if he’s talking to the adult child, born in 2014, diagnosed with “a crazy rare childhood eye cancer” the same year.

“We’re gonna save that eye,” he tells the camera, and the kid.

A turning point? Waldo’s pot-enthusiast/post-proselytizer uncles have a word with Dad. CBD oil might help with the chemo of traditional cancer treatment, and — anecdotally — with the cancer itself.

As they live in Philly, where strict anti-marijuana drug laws were still in force, that means they’ll have to travel to early-adapter/early-legalizer California to buy the pot-extract and figure out a way to get it home.

Yes, they use the good ol’U.S. Postal Service’s help “smuggling” their “illegal” drugs cross-country — packed in kiddie birthday party supplies.

Tommy Avallone’s film shapes Brian’s quixotic journey into a life quest, complete with medical experts, politicians and family members who figure in the larger story of a long-legal medical remedy, made illegal in the last century and only just-now being re-legalized and researched for its “natural” medicinal properties.

None of that was the case when Waldo got sick. The Dwyers couldn’t tell their doctors, and even as Waldo improved, it wasn’t a subject Brian’s conservative family approved of.

“Waldo on Weed” pokes at the politicization of marijuana and more or less embraces the “miracle drug” mania that has surrounded CBD and “legalized weed.”

Harvard’s Dr. Staci Gruber of Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) program at McLean Hospital in Boston is here to legitimize the research, and remind us that “every great discovery began with anecdotal evidence.”

And Snoop Dogg’s “Dr. Dina,”a California advocate for CBD treatments and legalized pot everywhere, was on hand to help Brian with his original hook-up. Pot entrepreneur Matt Rize figures prominently in the narrative, too.

Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania is here. And stay through the closing credits. Which hostess of “The View” executive produced “Waldo on Weed?”

We miss the cute, upbeat tone of the film’s opening chapter in its latter stages, as the family becomes CBD refugees (people move where the legal drug that’s helping them is). But “Waldo on Weed” is still the most adorable piece of cinematic advocacy for legalizing pot ever filmed.

Everybody lobbying against that — one such lobbyist is interviewed — should be sentenced to watching “Weed” and looking in little Waldo’s eyes before they make one more self-justified argument against legalization.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Brian Dwyer, Danielle Dwyer, Matt Rize, Dr. Dina, Dr. Staci Gruber, Governor Tom Wolf

Credits: Directed by Tommy Avallone. An Endeavor Content release.

Running time: 1:26

The trouble with buying into “dog eat dog” social Darwinism, the sort of mindset it takes to become a survivalist, is making that leap to accepting and becoming a “dog” yourself.

That’s subtext of many of “Man Hunts Man” thriller, from the good (“The Most Dangerous Game”) to the the humorous (Robin Williams and Walter Matthau ARE “The Surivors”), and even the hilariously bad (“The Hunt”).

And that’s the point pounded home in the French Canadian thriller “The Decline,” a lean, slow-starting survivalist tale that turns pulse-pounding for its final act.

The plot is similar to that 1983 Williams-Matthau comedy, a bunch of hand-picked survivalists are invited to a training compound in snowy northern Quebec by their Youtube Guru, Alain, played with dead-eyed verve by an actor ironically-named Réal Bossé. Because, being a no-nonsense survival expert and something of a cult leader, he pretty much is…REAL bossy.

Stop laughing. This is serious.

We’ve met one of the invited “prepared, enlightened citizens” — Antoine (Guillaume Laurin) — in the opening scene, running a “bug out” drill with his wife and little girl in the middle of the night.

Now he’s among eight fellow wannabe soldiers on Alain’s 500 acres of snow, trees, greenhouses, solar panels and booby traps for an intense immersion in rabbit hunting and gutting, living off the grid and commando training.

He’s created a “Temporary Autonomy Zone,” and make no mistake — Alain is no fool. He can make his own maple syrup, hunt, raise chickens and self-sustain on those 500 acres, which keep “the world at bay,” he says (in French with English subtitles).

They’re all white, mostly men — with an Army wife and another woman — and they stay in a heated barracks-tent, eat together, share their thoughts on “gun control,” a coming “economic crash,” the potential for a “pandemic” and Alain’s favorite boogeyman.

Imagine holding off “5000 migrants with 5000 machetes,” he enthuses. But don’t be quick to say you’ll kill a lone interloper. Suppose he’s a doctor, an extra pair of hands for needed labor?

That Alain, always planning ahead.

Of course, it all comes apart when the truly unexpected happens. A bunch of motivated amateurs, practicing bomb-making with black powder? What could go wrong?

Let the cover-up begin. Let the factions form. Let dog begin eating dog.

For such a short film, this one takes a while to get to the meat of the matter. The only real novelty to THIS version of “survivalists forced to kill to survive” story is the French Canadian setting and accents. Even a compassionate democracy with socialized medicine has its gun-nut outliers.

The violence of the long third act comes in a rush — a series of jolts. And it is visceral and as personal as it gets.

Maybe this isn’t the best movie to watch to “escape” the current shaky state of Western Civilization. None of the characters are much more than sketched in “types.”

But it’s an entertaining variation on a worn-out “self-reliance” theme, even if it won’t discourage a single Netflix user to put off that next trip to the AK-47 dealer down the street.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast:Réal Bossé, Marie-Evelyne Lessard, Guillaume Laurin, Marc-André Grondin

Credits: Directed by Patrice Laliberté, script by Nicolas Krief, Charles Dionne. A Netflix original.

Running time: 1:23

The extras sit at a table in the shadowy foreground of Rick’s Cafe Americain. She sees him doodle in a sketchbook, an image of a man in a strange uniform with distinctly pointy ears.

What’s his connection to the movie? He points at the director, Michael Curtiz, his adoptive father. But what this fellow named “Lucas” really wants to do is write.

His real name is John Meredith Lucas, and he’d go on, 25 years after “Casablanca,” to work on the original “Star Trek” series. Yeah, I had to look him up because that’s such a dumb thing to shove into an ostensible “historical” movie. And no, that moment on the set of “Casablanca,” sitting with a young woman (Evelin Dobos) never happened.

There’s a lot a lot of balderdash of this nature in “Curtiz,” a film about the tyrannical, guilt-ridden Hungarian emigre filmmaker at the helm of the retitled, rewritten, “troubled” production that became one of the most beloved films in cinema history –“Casablanca.”

Yes, it’s true studio chief Jack Warner floated the idea that Ronald Reagan (and Anne Sheridan) should star in the script that Warners bought, a play titled “Everybody Comes to Ricks.” No, producer Hal Wallis (who only considered Humphrey Bogart for the lead) never said Reagan was “Serving (in the military), like everybody else. Making America great again.”

No, Curtiz wasn’t saying, “Vot eez zees, a comedy?” Or “Vere izz Ron (Reagan)?”

But yes, Curtiz was famous for his temper and his too-thick-to-understand accent, something star Ferenc Legyel masters.

This Hungarian co-production didn’t have the rights to use the song “As Time Goes By,” doesn’t show the no-name actors playing “Casblanca’s principals — Bogey, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre or Sidney Greenstreet — in closeup. Because they hadn’t the budget.

Did Curtiz like to practice skeet shooting on the back lot, even after hours? Have sex with anything on two legs? Struggle mightily, with screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein, with the script and especially, “the ending?”

Sure, or at least that much of the movie’s true enough to not quibble with.

The actor S.Z. Sakall (József Gyabronka), a fellow Hungarian (along with others in the cast), was Curtiz’s pal and on-set consultant, confessor, the one he could complain to (in Hungarian) about the government censor, the studio, the actors, etc. True enough.

You cling to those little tidbits of truth and a few cute moments (inventing dialogue, composing that famous “last scene” with a model airplane, dwarf actors to make it look realistic, and a lot of smoke and fog) and try not to grind your teeth to the stump over the stuff that sticks out as “What does THAT have to do with the making of ‘Casablanca?”

The Swiss-born Hungarian director, Tamas Yvan Topolanszky, focused on Curtiz, his arrogance and personal torment, his cruelty to the “stupid immigrants” in his cast, and on beautifully atmospheric lighting and production design, surrounding his players in darkness stunningly photographed in black and white.

That, at least, is a defensible choice. The rest of “Curtiz?” Less so.

The estranged daughter “Kitty” (Dobos) is our surrogate, showing up in her father’s life (as he is copulating with a waitress who wants a career in the movies). Kitty is, added to the payroll and watched like a hawk on the set of this movie by a U.S. government censor (Declan Hannigan) hellbent on making this movie “patriotic,” making Curtiz fill out a “loyalty” questionnaire and rushing the film through production because he knows something big is happening in “Casablanca” and environs at the end of 1942.

The picture comes together haphazardly — both the movie within the movie, and “Curtiz” — as the womanizing director tries to keep his wife in her place, the pressure on an ambassador to help his remaining family in Hungary, on Jewish/German actor Conrad Veidt (Christopher Kreig), humiliating him to make him nasty enough to be a Nazi.

Don’t know that this happened either, but maybe.

If you’re not hung up on getting film history correct, on coherent plotting, on a production taking absurd liberties in the amount of “importance” attached to the movie, in production, and government interference, if you don’t mind a lot of colorless performances (save for Kreig, Legnyel and once or twice, Gyabronka), at least do yourself a favor and turn on the closed captioning.

Aside from one or two infamous “Curtizisms” — “Don’t talk to me vile I am INTERRUPTING!” — the dialogue is as banal as the picture is striking to look at. And much of that banal dialogue is in Hungarian.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, attempted sexual assault

Cast: Ferenc Lengyel, Scott Alexander Young, Evelin Dobos, Declan Hannigan, Andrew Hefler, József Gyabronka and Nikolett Barabas

Credits: Directed by Tamas Yvan Topolanszky, script by Tamas Yvan Topolanszky, Zsuzsanna Bak and (English dialogue) Ward Parry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

I hadn’t seen the absurdly entertaining British WWII film “The 49th Parallel” in ages, probably not since AMC was “American Movie Classics” and showed, you know, movies.

And the first thing that strikes you watching this self-described “propaganda film” today is what HD and a nice restoration job brings back to the glorious black and white cinematography of Freddy Young.

Stunning Canadian locations, from Hudson’s Bay to Niagara Falls, with Banff and the wheat-covered plains of Manitoba, such immaculate compositions that you don’t mind the rear projection/soundstage/water tank fakery that inserted British stars such as Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier into this world.

The second element to stand out is the uproarious fun Laurence Olivier — not quite a film “star” when this film came out in 1941 — has playing a French Canadian trapper. You have to search all the way to his late career vamps like “Sleuth” and “A Little Romance” to find the giddy glee he brings to Trapper Johnny who– only minutes before Nazi submariners storm into the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post where he is having his first shave and bath in a year– learns World War II had started in 1939.

He sings “Alouette,” he lays it on thick as he promises, “We gave you preety good leeking en ze last war. We do it again, eh?”

The best performance in the film is still by Raymond Massey, the most natural and I’d argue most “modern” screen actor in the lot — at home playing a soldier AWOL from the Canadian Army, jocular and friendly to his fellow boxcar tramp until he’s clubbed and figures out the guy’s a Nazi fleeing to the “neutral” United States.

But Olivier provides a fun front bookend to that Massey exclamation point in the coda.

Michael Powell, working with his favorite screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, was years from his Technicolor glories of “The Red Shoes” and “Black Narcissus.” David Lean was the increasingly accomplished editor who kept the action zipping along for this two hour — with the occasional pause for a political sermon — action picture. He’d transition to directing with “In Which We Serve,” and surpass Powell in the directing pantheon with “Laurence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.”

The idea was that they’d make a patriotic movie about a German U-Boat, sunk off the Canadian coast, with half a dozen ideological Nazi survivors evading capture but picked off one-by-one as they experience Canada’s diverse democracy, decency and intrepid spirit in the face of global fascism.

Timely? Shockingly, yes.

The Nazis want to find safe haven in the still-neutral U.S., and the filmmakers wanted to show America that its values demand that it join the fight against fascism.

Even the film’s edits, when Columbia Pictures distributed it in the U.S., seem timely. Nazi speeches about “Eskimos” and “Indians” and “Negroes” being “apes” and “inferior animals” had to be cut — because the distributors didn’t want Americans, especially in the Jim Crow South, to be offended by seeing their Nazi racial attitudes on the screen.

The sermons about tolerance, democracy, kindness and freedom — delivered by Olivier, Anton Walbrook (“The Red Shoes”), Leslie Howard (“Gone with the Wind”) and Massey (“Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” “East of Eden”) may play as pauses in a film that almost sprints from coast to coast. But they resonate still.

And the depiction of Nazis — fascists, Germany’s Proud Boys — might have seemed cartoonish twenty years ago. But they come off in 2020 much closer to the way they were originally received.

They are cultists, dogmatic, bigoted bullies. They need their guns, and practically cower when they don’t have one. Germany, we are reminded, overran weak, harmless Poland just before the film was shot. The submariners gun down unarmed Eskimos, club or shoot others and kill one of their own for not adhering to dogma.

One (Raymond Lovell) is a Proud Boys plump self-proclaimed know-it-all with “not my fault” and “don’t blame me” — “I take no responsibility” — on his cowardly lips at many a moment.

Eric Portman is perfectly vile as their leader, an officer who feels the need to proselytize when given the chance, always shocked when others — including immigrant German Hutterites (led by Walbrook) — don’t fall for the childish, bullying and racist Make Germany Great Again rhetoric.

That’s the thing about classic films. They keep talking to you long after the language of the day — cinematic, dramatic and rhetorical — has changed and the world has moved on. Here’s a classic that reminds us that we used to know Nazis aren’t “very fine people.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Eric Portman, Laurence Olivier, Anton Walbrook, Glynnis Johns, Raymond Lovell, John Chandos, Niall MacGinnis, John Chandos, Finlay Currie, Leslie Howard and Raymond Massey

Credits: Directed by Michael Powell, script by Emeric Pressburger and Rodney Ackland A General Film Distributors/Columbia Pictures release.

Running time: 2:03

Variety_Film (@Variety_Film) Tweeted: Film New Roundup: Animated Movie ‘The Queen’s Corgi’ Fetches North American Distribution https://t.co/f0nCkUKi6e https://t.co/2nYT9Bl0FB https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1243706128694784000?s=20

“Uncorked” pops, straight out of the bottle. A culture-clash comedy that throws African American Memphis BBQ culture into the snooty world of fine wines and the ordained high priests of that world — sommeliers — it has laughs and just enough edge and Courtney B. Vance at his drollest.

And then, it all but seizes up, its heart clogged up with pork fat, soapy melodrama, unnecessary characters and improbable plot twists.

Writer-director Prentice Penny, a producer on TV’s “Insecure,” has everything he needs for a frothy, fun film about worlds washing over each other, and then some. It’s the “then some” that lets him down.

That, and a foolish over-reach aimed at “keeping it real.”

Mamoudou Athie, who played Grandmaster Flash on TV’s “The Get Down,” is Elijah, the third generation of his family to take up the knife, the sauce ladle and the smoker at the family ribs joint Daddy (Vance) runs with Mom (Niecy Nash).

But that’s not where Eli’s heart is. He’s learning wine at his other job, a wine shop, where he’s absorbed enough from the boss to impress the pretty young nurse (Sasha Compère) who comes in knowing nothing about the grape.

He starts comparing wines to pop stars, and she wisely ignores Kanye (chardonnay) and goes home with Drake (Pinot Grigio). Yes, she’s smitten.

Trouble starts when Eli starts skipping BBQ work, which includes learning the biz from his Pops, to hit wine tastings.

Penny contrasts the all-black clientele of the BBQ eatery with the all-white gathering at wine tastings, and makes a choice not to make his movie about “THAT.”

Alas, it’s not about much else either. The “edge” devolves to the hip hop soundtrack, which augments the Memphis flavor that the picture aims for. It’s jarring to be hearing about “b—-es” and “n—ahs” as Elijah tastes this Malbec or that Shiraz.

The wine “study” element is routine in the extreme, an academic “Paper Chase” with study groups, competitive classwork “identification” tests — “Paper Chase” with “Pinot Noir.”

Eli’s classmates are a collection of stereotypes, not characters.

Vance is far and away the best element in the picture, and becomes its sole saving grace as Eli is suddenly shipped off to France, with his entire somm class, for months of study and polish.

Vance’s Louis travels from joking about his boy’s dream — “If you wanna tell people what to drink with their chitlins…” — to indulging his trek to Paris, answering the “How’s it going?” question with “Oh, you know…Black folks still eatin’ pork,” which he pronounces “poke” for authenticity.

Big family meals crack up when the relatives learn of Elijah’s dream — “Sommelier? Like the pirates?”

“No, that’s SOMALIA.”

“You know, Kelly MARRIED a Somali…”

There’s a lot that’s agreeable about “Uncorked,” but this overlong movie loses its fizz pretty much when Eli goes abroad. And as any oenophile will tell you, you can’t get that fizz back once the bottle’s “uncorked.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, lots of profanity

Cast: Mamadou Athie, Sasha Compère, Niecy Nash, Bernard David Jones, Kelly Jenrette, Gil Ozeri and Courtney B. Vance

Credits: Written and directed by Prentice Penny.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:44

While most film buffs have seen the post-war classic “Whisky Galore!”, a later comedy by Ealing Studios’ acknowledged Master of Twee and Laird of Laughter, Alexander Mackendrick, might have slipped by you.

“The Maggie,” cleverly re-titled “High and Dry” when it was theatrically released in North America, is a daft and deft 1954 farce newly-restored and paired with “Whisky” as a two-disc BluRay release by Film Movement.

It’s every bit as silly and Scottish as “Whisky Galore!,” boasts an impressive cast and plays like a lighthearted black and white travelogue, seeing the coast of Scotland via a “puffer.”

That’s what has the title role. The Maggie is an ancient coaster, a coastal waters/canal friendly freighter that the locals label “puffer.” She was ancient even at the time the movie was made, which is why maritime inspectors board and declare her unfit for further duty, sending her skipper, the rascal MacTaggart (Alex Mackenzie), into what amounts to a tizzy.

He needs cargoes to pay for repairs (the boat’s a real beater) and feed his crew of three, the Mate (James Copeland), the Engineer (Abe Barker) and “Wee Boy” (Tommy Kearins).

Maybe a loan from the local shipping broker (veteran character actor Geoffrey Keen)? Aye, but he’s too busy and wouldn’t be interested. Fortunately, there’s an attorney/aid (Hubert Gregg) to a wealthy American trying to get tubs, a stove and sundry other home renovation materials up to Kiltarra. Mr. Pusey is anxious because his airline-chief boss is in a hurry.
Always.

He hires the Maggie on the spot, but quite by mistake, mind you. He’d not heard of MacTaggart or the man’s reputation, which any Glasgow cabbie could pass along.

“Aye, there’s a man for you. Seen him drunk TREE times in one day!”

The rest of the movie is MacTaggart and his crew trying to dodge the rules and the long arm of “The American” (American character actor Paul Douglas of “Angels in the Outfield” and “It Happens Every Spring”) who is understandably upset that his pricey home appointments are being shipped by a con artist in a rust bucket.

The misadventures include running aground “on the subway” (the newly-built tunnel roof) on the River Clyde before they’ve cleared port, poaching pheasants from a “laird” who owns land along the Crinan Canal, a detour to a birthday party, assorted beachings and dockside mishaps.

The underlying theme here is as timeless as it is “Mayberry” old fashioned. Slow down, take an interest in people. What’s your rush? See the sights, have a Guinness!

Boat folks (like myself) will marvel at the delightfully primitive navigation gear that gets them through the fog — a lead line (depth sounder) and “radar” (Throwing coals fetched from the engine room, listening for “the plunk.” No “plunk” means “We’ve all made a big mistake.”).

And any modern viewer should be charmed at the long-lost Scotland captured here,“only pub in town” villages with their docks, their livestock trans-shipment, the homey values.

I’d say this was the best of the Scottish Mackendricks, as it ages better than “Whisky Garlore!” And if you’ve not seen it, put it on your list. Gorgeously shot, whimsically scripted and acted, it’s a dated delight from start to finish.

MPAA Rating: unrated, squeaky clean

Cast: Alex Mackenzie, Paul Douglas, Hubert Gregg, Geoffrey Keen, James Copeland and Tommy Kearins.

Credits: Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, script by William Rose. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:32

If the production design of the modest-budget space thriller “3022” is particularly impressive — an underlit space station of worn gear, lived-in living spaces and a touch of grime — that’s no accident. David Dean Ebert, art director on TV’s “Gotham,” knows his stuff.

And cinematographer Will Stone’s work here is a lot more impressive than it was in the daft “Faith Based” indie comedy.

Yes, their work won’t be seen by many, although with much of the world in isolation, “3022” will lure a few eyeballs via Netflix. They’ll see an impressive looking, glum, gloomy and stumbling space opera of the “tragic opera” genre.

It’s a “Something happened,” “We could be doomed” and “Is it a life worth living?” sci-fi tale about a space station cut off from Earth and everywhere else, with a handful of survivors going mad and/or dying as they try to grapple with that.

Yeah, hard to get happy after this one.

Omar Epps plays the captain in charge of Pangea, a mid-space refueling station between Earth and a Europa terraforming/colony-building project.

Kate Walsh, Miranda Cosgrove and Angus MacFadyen play the other members of a crew committed to ten year service their. The opening credits show their arrival, but we pick up the story five years in. They’re starting to lose it. Some of them, anyway.

Capt. John Laine is having night terrors. Jackie (Walsh), who has become his bedmate over the course of this mission, is on the receiving end of his sleep-violence. A single mom who left a daughter behind on Earth for this 10 year gig, she loses it when the doctor (MacFadyen) pronounces that since Capt. Laine (Epps) is “unfit,” they’re all unfit and have to summon a relief ship from Earth.

It never gets there. Something — some explosive “event” — cuts them off from contact with Earth. Oddly, for a “refueling” station, there is no traffic en route or out bound, to reach.

And we hear no talk of the colony under construction either. Nobody tries to call Europa. Pangea can’t reach “home” and that’s that.

An odd twist in the script — seeing John (above) clean-shaven as the crew tries to cope with calamities, death, “visitors” — alternating with John as a 60 year old version of Omar Epps — grey haired and bearded.

This framing device can fool you into wondering if Mr. Night Terrors isn’t hallucinating/”dreaming” everything that goes wrong, and then right and then further wrong.

It isn’t. Don’t be thrown by that. The screenplay doesn’t show that much imagination, and admittedly, that tired direction wouldn’t have been a blessing either.

MacFadyen has the chewiest role and his performance reflects that, the only one to truly stand out.

Conflict, suicide, minimal technical “work the problem” trouble-shooting — “3022” (That ISN’T the date this takes place.) feels like a generic, quick-and-dirty if claustrophobic, deep space thriller that could a little more light.

Not in the cinematography or production design, though. That is first-rate. Well, first-rate on a budget.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some violence

Cast: Omar Epps, Kate Walsh, Miranda Cosgrove, Jorja Fox and Angus MacFadyen

Credits: Directed by John Suits, script by Ryan Binaco.8  A Saban Films release, on Netflix.

Running time: 1:31

May 1…

“Mom’s…weird.”

“Mom’s always been weird.”

It’s easy to see why “Celebration,” an intimate working portrait of fashion designer Yves St. Laurent filmed over the last years of his life, was suppressed upon its completion in 2007.

It jumps out from the behind-the-scenes sketching, sewing, fussing over models, magazine and TV interviews, the birthday luncheon or the fete that honors “the last of the great couturiers,” Yves St. Laurent, and becomes clear long before the lingering image of Pierre Bergé fussily closing the film.

It was the portrayal of Bergé, the by-then former lover but still business partner, tycoon behind Yves St. Laurent Inc., that Bergé objected to.

Shy, soft-spoken and effeminate, St. Laurent (who died a year after the film was finished) is seen much as Bergé wanted him to be remembered, as a creator whose work seemed formed from his dreams, while he was dreaming.

Bergé ‘s mission? “I try never to wake him,” Bergé says to an interviewer.

Bergé is the one who snapped at suppliers on the phone, barked at the sea of publicists managing or mis-managing photo ops for shows and events, who took whatever awards were handed to St. Laurent at every fete, ensuring he’d never have to lug them about.

“Probably, I have a part of that,” he says (in French, with English subtitles), admiring a trophy.

Not invisible, never truly “behind the scenes,”  Bergé managed their philanthropy, financed museums and museum restorations. We see him helping install a “pyramidion” (designer cap) on an ancient Egyptian obelisk installed in Paris, a St. Laurent flourish promoting some show or event.

St. Laurent chain smokes, draws, sits for a long magazine interview (in sequences shot in black and white) and reflects.

Bergé kept the designer’s final, fatal health prognosis from St. Laurent, not letting him know he was about to die — and married him in a civil union just before his death, stage-managing him to the end.

Director Olivier Meyrou had lots of access, but made a film more concerned with artful flourishes than with gritty details. Watching and listening to two former seamstresses as they eagerly talk over one another touring the empty House of St. Laurent (headquarters), we pick up on the theme of “Celebration.”

Yes, we’re celebrating the artist. But everybody wants a piece of the credit, wants to ensure her or his place in the legacy.

Feature films on St. Laurent and other fashion documentaries have flowed into theaters and streaming serves in the dozen years since “Celebration” was finished, making this film feel almost quaint — an artifact. Others’ works have surpassed it, in many ways.

But it remains an eye-opening and artful look at just what it took to create that couture, that image and that legacy and that brand — still vital and popular all these years after the shy dreamer’s death.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some nudity

Cast: Yves St. Laurent, Pierre Berge

Credits: Directed by Olivier Meyrou. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:13