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My Darling Valentino
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Fairly vain. . .
Between its glossy cover-like, uber-stylish opening credits and its surreal flying finale at Rome's Colosseum, Valentino: The Last Emperor manages to record a personal and revealing portrait. It's as though Vanity Fair editor and "Special Correspondent," director Matt Tyrnauer, was using his magazine as a template, complete with celebrity quotes and black and white vintage photography, to expose the viewer to the inner workings and circle of the couture icon's fashion kingdom.
Neither merely a chronicle of the passionate love affair between the impeccably dressed Valentino and women's dresses, nor just a love story between Valentino and his business partner and companion of 50 years (which is the heart of the movie), rather, Valentino, the movie is, like the title spells out, a glimpse into a lifestyle that is completely alien to us commoners, subjects, and slaves to fashion. It depicts a reality where wealth and design meet to create a fantasy filled with hallucinatory settings and ersatz royalty as Nino Rota's famous melancholically whimsical La Dolce Vita plays on the soundtrack. During these moments of outlandish grandeur, Valentino swoons with the same intoxication that its subject has for the glamour that is Hollywood and all things glitzy and gilded. But Tyrnauer is less interested in the superficiality of the thing then in how it runs. His intoxication is just as contagious, nonetheless.
Despite the use of conventions that have become cliché through that systematic defilement of cinema verite that is reality television, Valentino manages to refreshingly portray moments of candidness, moments that in this case don't seem contrived, but yet maintain the same level of tension that you might find in the best of fictional potboilers. Will the old school seamstresses be able to pull off the hand-sewn gown in time? Will Valentino flip his wig and pull a Christian Bale on the camera guy? Will he retire? Will the big, bad private equity firm usurp the throne? Will the Pugs pee all over the emperor's new clothes? You half expect Tim Gunn to pop in and make everyone play pretty. And speaking of runaway projects: blink and you'll miss the model reading Einsteins' Unfinished Symphony while getting prepped for the catwalk. Just one of the movie's surreal little gems.
Valentino the designer (as well as Valentino, the movie) holds court to a who's who of the mono monikered, with Elton, Gwyneth, Uma, Armani, Lagerfeld, etc., all making appearances. By the time Dante (as in Academy Award winning Art Director Ferreti) is seen commenting on the meta-cinematic absurdity of the whole thing and begins to preside over the Felliniesque final act, we've realized that Valentino The Movie's "reel" world cannot possibly capture the scope of Valentino The Man's "real" world. What it does capture, however, is enough to remind us that movie heaven is also filled with documentaries.
Valentino: The Last Emperor starts Friday, April 3 at Laemmle's Sunset 5.
Q&A w/ director Tyrnauer: 4/4 @7:10pm, 4/5 and 4/6 @1:45pm and @7:10pm
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