Entertainment

ALL ABOUT ANNA

THE fear runs strong around this Anna

Wintour, with her fangy bangs that you could open an envelope on, her mirth-free smile, the Frisbee-sized shades that conceal her arctic skin crevasses but add to her polar froideur. Brrrr! I’m wearing a winter coat as I write. Also I’m standing at attention. Wait — she might read this. Yiiikes! Can we run it anonymously? [No. Ed.]

At the outset of the “The September Issue,” which is beaded with amusing moments about putting together the Tolstoy-ish forest killer that Vogue issued to inaugurate the fall of 2007, Wintour declaims of fashion that “People feel excluded or not part of the cool group, so, for some reason, they just mock it.” Not me!

The Vogue editor, described by one admirer as “the most powerful woman in the United States,” is a singular talent who has a gift for each of the two things she must do each day: saying, “I like this” and “I don’t like that.”

R.J. Cutler’s documentary never does catch Wintour lashing an assistant with her belt or any of the other dirty doings you know she gets up to when there isn’t a camera in her face. But if a syllable could kill (and it can, can’t it?), the movie would be the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” of the stiletto-heeled and dagger-toothed.

Wintour vivisects designers and editors with comments like, “Where’s the glamour?” “This is pretty weak,” “It’s a neck brace!” (said of a regrettably voluminous stole or scarf that, in truth, looks like it was assembled from tubing ripped off the Pompidou Center) and, simply, “No.”

Our prim Leatherface leaves the halls of 4 Times Square slick with the entrails of eviscerated fabulousness. “I want to kill myself,” whines one Vogue contributor as he seeks solace in his Jamba Juice. Even the issue’s cover girl, Sienna Miller, comes in for a takedown (when she isn’t present), for her catastrophically non-effulgent hair. Wintour evidently consented to the film as counterpropaganda to the movie “The Devil Wears Prada,” which came out the year before, but that strategy is like curing a whiskey spree with a beer. “The September Issue” is milder, but its cast of husky-voiced women and shrill men still generate plenty of chuckles.

Editor-at-large André Leon Talley, encased in so much fur it appears he’s being gang-tackled by a petting zoo, is shown moaning, “It’s a famine of beauty, my eyes are starving for beauty!” Later he’ll be seen vamping in a voluminously fringed black jacket that suggests Davy Crockett holding down Barneys instead of the Alamo.

The Jan Brady of the piece is Wintour’s perpetually frustrated creative director Grace Coddington, a former model who lost her looks to a car wreck and who seems to be the actual creative force responsible for dreaming up Vogue’s creamy fantasias. The movie tries to get inside Coddington’s imagination, but other than filming her watching France go by outside the window of her car, it is at a loss.

Instead, it falls into a rut of repeated scenes in which she complains (when the boss isn’t around) that Wintour has rejected another of her photos. At one point she is near tears in contemplation of negated beauty. If you hold that Wintour is not the Marcia Brady but the pope of fashion, that leaves Coddington as its Michelangelo.

Asked to name her weakness, Wintour offers, “My family,” and in a couple of scenes with her surprisingly sane daughter, Bee Shaffer, Wintour’s disappointment is palpable. Wintour disses the girl’s conservative attire, saying she is working at a lawyer’s office (“Judge’s office,” Bee corrects). When Bee offers the reason why she doesn’t care for Mom’s business (“It’s a really weird industry” in which people “act like fashion is life”), Wintour brushes back with a bitter look and a curt, “Well, it’s early days.” Rejected! Even the Pope of Seventh Avenue is no match for a self-assured daughter.

kyle.smith@nypost.com