Chicago-based Chelli Look, the subject at the centre of this diffuse documentary, seems like a nice person, with a talent for designing and making minimalist leather handbags. Not long out of high school, the best friend with whom she planned to start a business died in a car accident. Then her elder sister, Megan Henneberg, was murdered in 2007 by her husband Brian, leaving Chelli, her parents, siblings and extended family to deal with the harrowing loss.
And yet, no matter how much sympathy you might feel for Chelli and her family’s trauma, or interest you might have in her bagmaking skills, or engagement with her as a person, somehow those core components don’t coalesce to make this feature-length documentary feel vital or even especially necessary. A self-described introvert, Chelli herself is a pretty opaque figure although she speaks quite expressively and intelligently about her approach to design. We only get tiny glimpses of her home life with husband David, so she’s not really developed as a “character” sufficiently to carry the film.
Meanwhile, the story around her sister’s murder has something of a shroud around it, which is understandable to an extent, but then turns the film into a strange fan dance, alternating revelation with concealment about the facts of the case. In the end, the fact that Chelli found a way to forgive her brother-in-law in a religious sense, seems to be the big takeaway, but the wafty haziness around the whole issue reduces the murder to a brutal but incidental noise off-screen.
The most engaging parts of the film are the scenes where Chelli is at work at her fancy industrial Juki sewing machine in her alarmingly tidy, sepulchre-white studio. The hum of the machinery is as seductively lulling as an ASMR video and watching Chelli buy leather hides is pure shopping pornography. Even more visually lush is the sequence where Chelli goes off to Florence to take a course in leatherwork and design to refine her skills, offering the film-makers a chance to shoot one of the world’s more photogenic cities at crepuscular times of the day. All of which makes the surprise ending even more baffling, denying viewers the redemption–through–small-business-ownership ending the film appears to be striving for.
• Dawn Dusk is on digital platforms from 15 August.
