Victoria Beckham
Netflix
**
David Beckham has a joke for his wife, Victoria, at the start of this three-part Netflix documentary.
“What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear.”
The former Spice Girl turned fashion designer is not impressed.
“He thinks this is going to be ‘his’ moment in the documentary. It’s not about him, it’s about me.”
Victoria Beckham, aka “Posh Spice”, famously had a moment in her husband’s eponymous 2023 documentary. She was talking about growing up working-class when David interrupted and made her admit she was driven to school in her dad’s Rolls-Royce. It was the funniest scene in the film.
Now, as she says, this is her documentary. Whatever happened to just having his and hers towels?
Directed by Nadia Hallgren, who helmed the Michelle Obama bio-doc Becoming, Victoria Beckham covers some parts of its subject’s life in great detail while ignoring others.
We hear a lot about her childhood, much of it preserved on home video. She sang and danced from a young age, finding that her shyness went away when she was on stage. She would get the same boost on joining the Spice Girls.
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She did grow up in a lovely big house, but her dad had renovated it from scratch on his own. It is all part of a portrait of Victoria as a grafter who has worked damn hard for everything. At one point, she “felt like a firefighter”. Occasionally, you have to remind yourself she was not, in fact, running into burning buildings to put food on the table, but was instead launching a fashion label.
The film tells her life story while hopping back and forth to Paris Fashion Week. There have indeed been tough times. She has been treated viciously by some parts of the media. “Why women hate Posh” screamed one typical headline. She was weighed on TV after the birth of one of her sons.
She touches on her struggles with body image - “When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying” - without going into detail. While that is an understandable omission, others are not. Nothing is said, for instance, about the reported rift with son Brooklyn.
She is candid and teary about her business going millions into the red and having to ask David for help. The man himself floats in and out of scenes, making the occasional comment. “It made me panic,” he admits on hearing about the business being in trouble.
Oddly, there are no interviews with the other Spice Girls. Their comments come from archive footage. In the main, the talking heads - including designer Tom Ford, fashion maven Anna Wintour, and pal Eva Longoria - are complimentary.
Hallgren makes increasingly desperate attempts to ramp up the drama as the film nears its end. Some of the scenes at the Paris show are pure Zoolander.
Spoiler alert: the show is a triumph, Victoria’s make-up and beauty range is a hit, and all is well. As for the gaps in the story, the film and its subject are content to drape something fabulous over them and carry on as though nothing is amiss, but it is.
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