SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED Wintour is not amused.

In the world of documentaries, you take what the world gives you. Sometimes, that’s the good news. When Cutler set out to chronicle the creation of Vogue’s 2008 September issue, the thickest issue on Vogue’s calendar, he probably thought he would be celebrating the extraordinary power of the magazine, and especially of Anna Wintour, the icy elf-queen of the fashion world, who rules Vogue with an iron fist clad in a $400 Italian hand-sewn glove. Since it was Wintour herself who suggested focusing on the September issue, Cutler probably thought he’d be getting intimate access to Wintour.

Well, sort of. Wintour turns out to be a pretty tough interview, unwilling to be very introspective or forthcoming. But along the way, Cutler had two pieces of luck. First, he realized that the real interest of this story is the interaction between Wintour and Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director. Wintour is cool and perfectly assembled; Coddington is open in interviews and rather endearingly frazzly. Wintour glides through the offices as if always on her way somewhere more interesting; Coddington clomps around as though there’s work to be done and she’s the one to do it. She’s riveting, and Cutler wisely cuts back and forth between the two women, showing how the magazine emerges from creative conflict.

The second piece of luck came after filming; with the magazine industry in trouble, his portrait of the making of Vogue’s biggest issue ever has an unintended undertone of irony and elegy, like a documentary about Nero in which you can see a fire starting somewhere in the background. That’s just luck, but Cutler’s film is entertaining enough to deserve that lucky break.

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