Movie Review
threeASFOUR: Full Circle
7/10
TLDR
Sean Ono Lennon’s threeASFOUR: Full Circle is a stirring, fly-on-the-wall portrait of three designers who have spent 25 years choosing art over money. The archival footage is a treasure trove, and while the later collections blur together, it still proves genuine fashion design never goes out of style.
Where to watch: In theaters November 13 (Film Forum, New York); more cities at threeasfourfilm.com
The Facts
Synopsis: For more than 25 years, the designers behind the avant-garde fashion collective threeASFOUR, Gabi Asfour (Lebanese-Palestinian), Angela Donhauser (German-Tajikistani), and Adi Gil (Israeli), have made clothing with an uncompromising vision, earning a cult following, museum exhibitions, and fans like Björk and Chloë Sevigny. Behind the acclaim is a constant fight to survive in an industry driven by commerce, and a portrait of three artists who keep choosing creativity and collaboration over money.
Director: Sean Ono Lennon; co-directed by Brian C. González
Stars: Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, Adi Gil, with Kai Kühne
Rated: Not Rated
Running Length: 95 minutes
The Thoughts
America’s fascination with the behind-the-scenes world of fashion may have faded as we stretched into the double-digit seasons of Project Runway, possibly because its jump from Bravo to Freeform (streaming on Hulu and Disney+ right after) and the return of Heidi Klum have turned it into a show more interested in incited drama than in fashion and skill. It’s now hard to get through 40 quick-ish minutes, when even six years ago I would have been dumbstruck that 90 minutes for one episode was all we could fit in. Still, Sean Ono Lennon’s threeASFOUR: Full Circle reminds us that genuine fashion design never goes out of style.
Lennon spent five years with a downtown design quartet, who trimmed to a trio after their fourth member left to venture out on his own, and he caught all of it, the glitzy ups you’d expect from the people who dress Björk and Lady Gaga, and the gritty downs nobody posts about, from the overdue rent to the empty coffers to the constant pressure to go commercial. Through it all, a scrappy spirit and a stubborn refusal to compromise keep their integrity intact. It’s the first feature documentary for Lennon, who co-directed with Brian C. González, and it’s a stirring one, even if it leaves you wanting to see a little more of where each collection begins.
After its premiere at the Tribeca Festival, threeASFOUR: Full Circle opens November 13 at New York’s Film Forum, with Lennon and the designers on hand for Q&As all opening weekend, and more cities will be posted on the film’s website as they’re added, so check there for showtimes near you.
Coming Full Circle With threeASFOUR
If you don’t know the name, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the work. Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil started out in 1998 as ASFOUR, a downtown design collective with a fourth partner, Kai Kühne, and when he left to start his own label in 2005, the remaining trio became threeASFOUR. In the years since, they’ve dressed Björk (who calls herself their number one fan), Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Mariah Carey, landed pieces in the Met’s Costume Institute and London’s V&A, and won the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2015. Their work even made it to Minneapolis, as part of the Designs for Different Futures exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 2020 and 2021.
What makes them so interesting, though, is where they come from. Asfour is Lebanese-Palestinian, Donhauser is German-Tajikistani, and Gil is Israeli, and they’ve long called themselves a “United Nations of Fashion,” building collections like InSALAAM InSHALLOM, which wove Jewish and Arabic symbols together, around the idea that beauty can bring people together rather than pull them apart. In a world as divided as ours, three friends from those backgrounds sharing a worktable for more than 25 years feels like a radical act all on its own.
Art Over Commerce, Rent Over Everything
The real tension in the film isn’t on the runway but in the ledger. Lennon follows the trio as they mount a new collection that fuses technology with couture craftsmanship while the bills pile up, including a $20,000 rent debt to their Chinatown landlord that hangs over everything. The desperation to survive in the industry without having to change course and go more commercial is evident, and you can feel the division in the group at times, with talk of slight changes that could alter their intent in the hopes of bringing in more money, at the expense of their reputation.
It’s the oldest story in the arts, but it lands harder when you see it on the faces of people who’ve given half their lives to the work. Lennon, who knows a thing or two about making art inside a commercial industry, asks in his director’s statement in the production notes, “Can the true worth of art ever be quantified in money?” His answer is “I don’t believe it can,” and threeASFOUR: Full Circle makes that case without ever having to say it out loud.
A Fly on the Studio Wall
The problem with a film about fashion is that you inevitably have just a few things to explore, the creative minds of the designers and their work, and both can be hard to nail down on camera in a way that makes logical sense. Thankfully, Lennon makes his film a real work of art by pairing a treasure trove of archival material from the team’s 25 years with the new looks he captures during filming, creating an intensely watchable feature with a real poignancy to it.
Lennon says the late Albert Maysles, of Grey Gardens fame and the director of another fashion portrait, Iris, once told him the key to documentary filmmaking was to look through the camera without judgment, and you can see that advice all over the film. He lets his camera observe these creative interactions, making for a fascinating fly-on-the-wall experience as the designers talk to one another like colleagues, rarely bickering but disagreeing from a collaborative perspective. That becomes interesting to watch as the film goes on, because you’d imagine it would be more fiery, yet their 25-year relationship has given them a shorthand of speech and design.
Writer and editor Jenny Golden, who also cut the documentary Bully, shapes five years of footage into something with a clear arc, and the score from Tom Rogerson includes several tracks he made with Brian Eno.
Show After Show
For all that access, the film has one blind spot. We do get the design genesis and a real feel for how they collaborate, and some of the best moments come when the three of them circle a dress form and each spots a different area that needs work, and somehow they’re all right. What gets glossed over is the spark, the moment a collection first begins to take shape. The first show we visit gets a real focus, but as time passes, the shows that follow start to blur together, as if they’re somehow less important. Anyone who ever watched a Project Runway contestant stare down a blank dress form in the workroom will wish Lennon had gone back to the beginning a few more times.
Where Lennon gets it right is in letting the designers be the stars of their own show. The collective has a long list of celebrity clients, but the famous faces stay on the margins, with Chloë Sevigny in an archival interview, Björk in a video, and Marisa Tomei in a filmed introduction to an acceptance speech. It would have been easy to fill the film with famous friends singing their praises, but by keeping the focus on Gabi, Angela, and Adi, you come to understand why those friends keep coming back. And what clothes they are, from 3D-printed dresses made with the tech company Stratasys to pieces built from vintage denim and old canvas paintings, a reminder of why museums keep calling.
threeASFOUR: Full Circle isn’t a glossy peek behind the velvet rope like The First Monday in May, or a celebration of a lone legend like Bill Cunningham New York. It’s a portrait of three artists who keep choosing each other and their vision over a paycheck, and it’s all the more moving for it. Fashion fans will find plenty to swoon over, and anyone who has ever tried to make a living doing what they love will see a bit of themselves in this scrappy, stubborn trio, who would rather owe the landlord than owe anybody a piece of their vision.
The Final
threeASFOUR: Full Circle is a stirring portrait of three designers who keep choosing each other and their vision over a paycheck. Fashion fans will swoon, and anyone who’s chased a dream will see themselves in this stubborn, scrappy trio.
7/10
Where to watch: In theaters November 13 (Film Forum, New York); more cities at threeasfourfilm.com
Reviewed by Joe Botten
Joe Botten is The MN Movie Man, a Twin Cities film critic writing spoiler-free reviews since 2012. He also writes for Loud and Clear Reviews, a Rotten Tomatoes approved site. Find him on Instagram and Letterboxd.
Looking for something?
Search by actor, movie, director, genre or keyword.
Leave a Reply