John Galliano shows the cancelled can be uncancelled

Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low: John Galliano charts the highs and (spectacular) low of the British fashion designer who was fired as creative director of Dior after a number of anti-Semitic tirades came to light. I went into the cinema wanting to hear what Galliano had to say about it all. Why Jews, John? Why not Buddhists? What was going on? But the film never properly gets to the bottom of it. (‘I have no memory of that’ is his favourite reply.)

As to whether the ‘cancelled’ can be ‘uncancelled’, there is a clear answer: yes. He is now riding high and appears to have been forgiven by the fashion world. But whether he’s been forgiven by me is another matter entirely.

Macdonald, who is best known for Whitney and also that glorious film The Last King of Scotland, does not initially run away from Galliano’s disgrace. The film opens with footage from that 2011 evening in a Paris bar when he picked a fight with a woman at the next table and shouted: ‘Dirty Jew face,  you should be dead!’ Later, filmed footage of another incident emerged. Same bar, different woman, and this time it was: ‘I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.’ It’s all shockingly ugly, as he will confirm. ‘It was disgusting,’ he says, but later can’t recall how many incidents there were. (Just one, he thinks, when there were three.) He has since been tutored by rabbis and has met Holocaust survivors – but I’m not convinced any of it has actually sunk in. He’s asked outright: ‘Why John, why?’ He replies: ‘I don’t know!’

This is standard fare stylistically, with Galliano’s interview to camera interspersed with vintage footage and talking heads who, more often than not, are nice about him.