The setup: A 'Chicago historian' buys a box of film negatives at a real estate auction in attempts to recover some original, historical photos of the city. He brings the photos home, looks at them, and in his mind, they are very good. He researches the artist's name: Vivian Maier. No luck. He hunts down more of her negatives until he has a collection nearing 100,000. They are a hit online. Upon more research, he realizes that Maier has just died, alone and broke. Her photos are a revelation to the art world, and yet she shared them with no one.
What a mystery...
Our trusty historian (a measly 20-something year old named John Maloof) begins the research of finding out more about the artist, perhaps for no more reason than that it would make an intriguing feature-length documentary. He makes some phone calls, does some traveling around Chicago. What Vivian Maier was in life was no more than a nanny; watching children and serving as live-in care for families across the suburbs.
These children (now grown) and their parents provide most of the narration we see throughout the film. They recall memories of Vivian ("she always had a camera," "she was a mystery," "she was weird") and work to piece together a picture of this woman the world now admires. What I found most interesting were the stories of these people, claiming to be her friends, believing they 'knew' her. The wide range of interviews and some contradictory recollections about her photography methods imply that these are unreliable narrators, and indeed, many of these people are characters of themselves. Wide-eyed and eager to impress the camera, we get stories ranging from child abuse to trips to the meat factory. In many ways, Vivian Maier is proven to be a real Mary Poppins.
Who's to say what is real and what is fiction? With so little known about Ms. Maier aside from the testimonies of people who were 6 years old when they knew her, much of her story seems like it will remain a mystery forever. People who knew her remembered her as "that French woman," known for her faint foreign accent, but indeed a birth certificate (and linguist) prove that she was born in New York City. She was a packrat and had a taste for the macabre, remembered for being both loving and stern... Sometimes, it seems, people can't leave a mystery be.
For all it's worth and for the work put into the movie, her photos are all the more beautiful, shown throughout the film as though a slideshow or pictorial essay. What a sad, lonely life Vivian Maier led (so we assume), and yet how lucky the world is that she lived it at all.
(Awards potential: Best Documentary)
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