BOYISH in her gamin crop and tie, Isabella Rossellini faced down the camera. For sure, she acknowledged, aging is a bummer. “My social status has diminished because I know I’m not invited to the A parties anymore,” said Ms. Rossellini, 60. “My daughter is. As you grow older, you don’t count anymore.”

With that, she erupted into peals of laughter touched with rue, the legacy of a lifetime of highs and lows in front of the camera.

Her latest performance, captured by the photographer and filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, offers a dose of the candor that highlights his new documentary, “About Face: The Supermodels, Then and Now.” The film, to be broadcast Monday on HBO, pokes behind the fastidiously maintained facades of some of the most celebrated beauties of the last half-century.

Jerry Hall, China Machado, Marisa Berenson and Lisa Taylor are but a handful of the runway legends who wax funny and dour by turns as they reminisce with Mr. Greenfield-Sanders, taking up the highly charged issues of racism, drug abuse, self-image and, perhaps most provocatively, the topic of age, fashion’s last and, arguably, most fearsome taboo.