Valentino: The Last Emperor

Escape: I needed some escape from torture, from the Holocaust, from the financial crisis. So I left work and by myself, something I am prone to do, I went to the Cinema to see Valentino: The Last Emperor. It's a documentary about the haute couture designer Valentino. Great, I thought as I sat in the back row with a medium popcorn for dinner. Fashion, frivolous fashion.

That's not what the film is about.

Valentino designed hand stitched dresses for the rich and beautiful for 45 years. He is fabulously wealthy with a villa in Rome, another in Paris, and a yacht. His face is now too tan, his hair doesn't move, and one suspects might not still be his. He is a tiny man without a bit of fat on his seventy-five year old body. For all of those 45 years, he has been the friend, lover, and business partner with Giancarlo. Giancarlo runs the business, or should I say, ran the business.

This is the story about genius, about creativity, about an intimate relationship, and about how beauty turned from creation for the super rich to industry for those who long to be.

The film was directed by Matt Tyrnauer. This is his first film. According to Matt, he was fired every night by the unpredictable Valentino, and every morning received a call to come back and film again. That isn't in the documentary.

The film is pretentious and impossible, too. The rarefied life of those who flutter around the haute couture fashion shows--Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Princess So-And-
So from Bulgaria--what do we have in common with these women? They are Valentino's muses, they are the women he dreams about when he designs clothes.

The film is also about the demise of fashion, from houses where clothes were sewn by hand, made to order, to corporate licensing, where the designers are just logos and decisions are made by money men. Off the rack clothes, belts, shoes, and handbags are designed by anonymous young stylists, stitched in sweat shops in the country with the lowest wages, then sold for enormous amounts of money to hard working women who long to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Princess So-And-So from Bulgaria. Those same belts and handbags are all knocked off in factories in China, sometimes with the logos misspelled, and sold on the streets to the less successful women who want to look like, well, you know who.

The clothes are fantastic, pure fantasy, and there are 45 years of gowns to see. Really, I thought I was going to see something mindless, but instead I glimpsed into the world of a genius and corporate culture.