Like a feel-good episode of MTV’s “True Life,” “Suited” is the kind of documentary that doesn’t seek to open up its topic any more broadly than the people it features. It sticks to anecdotes, putting human faces on specific experiences that shouldn’t be pushed to the fringes.
New York-based clothing company Bindle & Keep specializes in custom-made suits for transgender men and women. The handful of customers presented in “Suited,” from Derek (who needs a suit for his wedding) to Jillian (an attorney who needs one for court), all say that options off the rack don’t fit or feel right on them. More importantly, after years feeling at odds with their bodies, they want the confidence of looking good and feeling like the suit shapes them the way they think they should look, bridging the gap between biological sex and identified gender.
Produced by Lena Dunham and much more about humanity than fashion, “Suited” falls into a rut of new customer, short story, new customer, short story, repeat. The doc mostly minimizes adversity in these lives to emphasize the positive changes in their present and in the world at large. A bigger discussion of how that tolerance has been driven and what’s left to accomplish would contextualize the movie (which is just about 80 minutes) into something more. As is, it’s informative about the lives of people who are transgender and more uplifting, refreshing evidence that the basic human desires to be happy and comfortable are increasingly accessible to a broader community.
3 stars (out of four)
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