Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low: John Galliano charts the highs and (spectacular) low of the British fashion designer who was fired as creative director of Dior after a number of anti-Semitic tirades came to light. I went into the cinema wanting to hear what Galliano had to say about it all. Why Jews, John? Why not Buddhists? What was going on? But the film never properly gets to the bottom of it. (‘I have no memory of that’ is his favourite reply.)

As to whether the ‘cancelled’ can be ‘uncancelled’, there is a clear answer: yes. He is now riding high and appears to have been forgiven by the fashion world. But whether he’s been forgiven by me is another matter entirely.

The RE teacher at my school used to call me ‘the Christ killer’; for the record, I did not do it

Macdonald, who is best known for Whitney and also that glorious film The Last King of Scotland, does not initially run away from Galliano’s disgrace. The film opens with footage from that 2011 evening in a Paris bar when he picked a fight with a woman at the next table and shouted: ‘Dirty Jew face,  you should be dead!’ Later, filmed footage of another incident emerged. Same bar, different woman, and this time it was: ‘I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.’ It’s all shockingly ugly, as he will confirm. ‘It was disgusting,’ he says, but later can’t recall how many incidents there were. (Just one, he thinks, when there were three.) He has since been tutored by rabbis and has met Holocaust survivors – but I’m not convinced any of it has actually sunk in. He’s asked outright: ‘Why John, why?’ He replies: ‘I don’t know!’

This is standard fare stylistically, with Galliano’s interview to camera interspersed with vintage footage and talking heads who, more often than not, are nice about him. Anna Wintour is nice about him, as are Edward Enninful, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell who hasn’t seen the footage and doesn’t need to because, as she states high-handedly: ‘I know John.’ This is partly funded by Condé Nast and, while Macdonald has said he was allowed to make the film he wanted and that we should make up our own minds about Galliano, it does seem insistent on pushing a redemptive arc.

Certainly, Galliano did not have an easy childhood in Streatham, south London, where his father, a Spanish plumber, would beat him for being a ‘faggot’. He had actually lived in Gibraltar until he was six and grew up, it is mentioned, on a street called ‘Sefaty’s Passage’, which couldn’t sound more Jewish if it tried. I look it up. Jewish, and also, at one end of the street, Gibraltar’s oldest synagogue. Did his strictly Catholic parents and other Catholics in the vicinity drip poison in his ear? But these sorts of questions, which seem crucial to me, are never asked. That said, we do get someone saying that in some parts of Spain it is still believed that Jews ‘have tails’ and ‘killed Christ’. (The RE teacher at my school used to call me ‘the Christ killer’; for the record, I did not do it.)

Galliano is certainly prodigiously talented and there are plenty of incredible clothes swishing up and down the runway. But if this film is about anything it’s about the lack of pastoral care in the fashion industry, where its stars are worked to death. Galliano ended up an alcoholic addicted to pain-killers and other prescription drugs. There were signs. One time he crouched for four hours on all fours in the lift at the Ritz in London, pretending to be a lion and roaring when anyone tried to get in which, I’m not going to lie, I’d have quite liked to see. Yet no one staged an intervention.

He is now creative director at Maison Margiela, where his latest show was received rapturously. But then fashion crowds, like ballet crowds, are rapturous about everything. I remain unconvinced.