I saw Eleven Minutes during its world premier at the 2008 Philadelphia Film Festival. The documentary chronicles the efforts of Season One Project Runway winner Jay McCarroll to get his debut collection to the Fashion Week scene at Bryant Park. McCarroll, of course, showed up to promote the movie and show his post feature film fashion collection at the after party. Very infused with his signature say-it-all personality, McCarroll thanked the audience for coming to see the show that would make him “more famous.” As light hearted as the line was intended to sound, I couldn’t help but catch on to how it illuminated the glaring, contradictory self indulgence of what turned out to be an over saturated, silly film.

“People don’t think; they think it’s like an hour.” So McCarroll bemoans that his Project Runway fans, though the show well exploits fashion design’s tendency towards chaos, still don’t have a clue about all the long, arduous team work that goes in to producing a collection and a corresponding show. Changing this alleged consensus is what filmmaker Michael Selditch said Eleven Minutes was all about, but I hardly think the effort is necessary in a world where fashion design is so marveled at for its complexity that the extremely fast pace of Project Runway so thrills us. Really, I didn’t need 106 minutes to convince me that McCarroll is passionate and perseverant when it comes to his work; I got that from cable.

The structure of this documentary is pretty standard, though not very straightforward. The film follows McCarroll as he sketches his collection, assembles a team, and outsources his garments’ construction. Many an interview shows the designer to be full of personality that can be raw, refreshing, and funny, while other contact with the camera shows McCarroll to be a tad too full of himself. He often complains that he is unjustly defined by Project Runway, his role in reality TV. He says this very honestly and full of conviction… to the camera filming yet another documentation of his fledgling career. Worse though is McCarroll’s horrendous PR girl who whines throughout the entire production and embarrassingly cries at the movie’s ending show. The reason why Eleven Minutes isn’t nearly as entertaining as Project Runway is that there is a difference between surprise and scripted conflict. While the sewing snafus on the television show seem to be a product of a natural tendency toward mayhem, the issues in Eleven Minutes feel preceded by an off camera discussion about ‘what to complain about.’ Really, it was all too much.

For what it’s worth, McCarroll is an amazing talent, and his ending fashion show was a smash; I wanted each and every piece for my own wardrobe. If it were only eleven minutes, Eleven Minutes would have been a lifetime’s worth of fun.

Liz Licorish
LizFlix@ElitesTV.com