Valentino - L'ultimo imperatore

I love when people are really, deeply passionate about something. While I'm not a big fan of sports, I love to listen to my friends give the details of their latest game or match; even though the actual event isn't particularly interesting to me, the fact that it means so much to someone (especially someone close to me) makes it far more interesting. Valentino: The Last Emperor shows a man who is passionate about fashion; he never thought of being a firefighter or anything else. Even in the midst of financial shuffling and lavish celebrations, Valentino never loses sight of why he does what he does: he wants to make beautiful clothes for beautiful women.

And his passion is contagious. After a show, he is greeted by fans who are in tears at the sheer genius of what they see on the runway. It's impossible not to be as impressed as they are; while the fashion, in this film, takes a backseat to the man himself, it is still breath- taking. Just as Ratatouille allows you to brush with what it means to love food on a deeper lover, so this film allows a glimpse into what it means to really love fashion.

Of course, fashion isn't the only thing on display here; Valentino himself is a fascinating subject for a documentary. On one hand, he's a genius. On the other, he's a diva (though it really isn't that surprising that those two go hand-in-hand). The little moments this film shows--the glimpses of Valentino's everyday life--provide a sense of a life that seems like it's from another planet. A model getting her hair done reads about Einstein. Five pugs line up on the seats of a private jet. Valentino tells his partner and lover Giancarlo Giametti that the design for a stage isn't right, mere hours before the show must go on.

Yet, even with the tantrums and mood swings (at times, Valentino yells at the cameraman, providing a strange sense of reality TV), you get the sense that Valentino really hasn't been affected by the power and money he's accumulated over the years. He simply wants to make sure that his work is presented in the best way possible. And what work it is. At the celebration of Valentino's 45 year career, his dresses line the walls, sit atop columns, and rest within glass cubes. Each piece represents a time so perfectly, because no designer is as important or relevant as Valentino.

As much as the film celebrates his past, Valentino's future is also discussed to a great degree. The question is asked: who can follow in Valentino's footsteps, when he inevitably retires? The answer is obvious: nobody can. There's only one Valentino, the Last Emperor of fashion.

This documentary by 'Vanity Fair' correspondent Matt Tyrnauer tells two stories. First it depicts the extraordinarily long-lived life/business partnership of Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giametti. Second it shows the ravages of a changing world in which haute couture is falling into the hand of financiers and the exploiters of brand names. In the days of Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita', Valentino met Giancarlo in Rome on the Via Veneto--they differ about at which café it was--and the friendship, love affair, and business partnership that resulted led to the 45-year reign of the house of Valentino. During the year filmmaker Tyrnauer followed the partners, Valentino is both spectacularly celebrated--and chooses to resign. Bought by investors, his name now belongs to others. It is likely that the fabulous gowns all sewn by hand and covered with embroidery and sequins by a team of industrious and skillful women in Milan will no longer be made. And the whole fashion industry is changing from the top down. Compared to where it was in the grand old days of the Fifties, it now is far more huge and enormously more profitable. But the fabulous haute couture design paraded on runways, fashion's creative center, is fading in scale and importance, because the money isn't there to pay for it. Couture is bleeding away its exquisite heart to the pursuit of "market share" and money.

In the days of his rise Valentino provided a whole wardrobe to Jacqueline Kennedy. And there were many others just as elegant and beautiful. His stated principle is that he gives women what they want and what they want is beauty. His style as a designer is supremely beautiful, accessible, classic--a little conventional (insofar as such craft and expense can be thought conventional). He awes and delights; he does not shock. Everything is sewn by hand. In the workshop where the women make his gowns, there was once a sewing machine, but nobody ever used it. The movie stars and the titled aristocrats still turn out for the fashion do's, but the fashions themselves, the most exquisite and luxurious of them, are facing gradual extinction.

Matt Tyrnauer made this film in 2007; his timing was good to tell his two stories, the human one and the financial one. (The financial one undercuts and spoils the aesthetic one, but no matter; that is the subliminal message.) He captured Valentino in Rome and Paris where he has fabulous houses, in his private plane where his five pugs take up a double leather-cushioned seat, and Gstaad where (though 75) he skies downhill at breakneck speed, and on his large and streamlined yacht. We see Valentino's marvelous hand as he sketches instantly perfect designs on paper. We see the arguments over ruffles and sequins and the head seamstress berating her underlings for their incompetence when a row of stitches must be done all over. The film is not so long on detail and history but it is strong on atmosphere. And it captures the dressed-to-the-nines Italian elegance of the perfectly suited Giancarlo and Valentino and the grandeur of the runways (none grander than these) and the tension and expletives and superlatives of the fitting room.

More important, Tyrnauer captured the ceremony in Paris where Valentino, never keen to admit debts to others, holds back sobs as he acknowledges, when made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, that he would never have won this medal nor had this glittering career without Giammetti forever at his side. The camera swerves breathlessly back and forth between the two men, collecting Valentino's gasps and Giancarlo's elegantly modest smile and nod of thanks. It is a great moment in the histories of fashion and of gay partnerships.

Later, in Rome, the fashion house spends 200,000 euros on a fabulously beautiful and elegant celebration of the designer's career. At this point for several years interest in company has been bought, and there is a new business partner, Matteo Marzotto. Then a financial investor has gotten hold of a controlling interest, and Valentino's resignation decision came two months after the celebration. He was never any good at business. A man with a sense of humor, he confesses in public that he was always hopeless at everything else besides designing clothes.

Valentino and Giancarlo are rarely apart, day and night. Giametti somewhat extravagantly declares that in 45 years he has only been away from Velentino for two months total. Tyrnauer has a moving target to deal with, shifting between places and from Italian to English to French in a moment. They are always on the move. Now and then the camera catches a choice moment of bickering. Velentino seems to object to pretty much anything he hasn't thought of himself, including a replaced ruffle, a desert background for a fashion show, a location for the Rome celebration, a choice of color. If it wasn't his idea, it sucks. He's often smiling, but his mouth is in a perpetual prune-y pout. Valentino thinks of himself as delivering decisions to Giancarlo, and often uses French to do so, though traded gibes about double chins or pot bellies or too dark a tan are tossed off in Italian. And there is much to amuse and to touch here. Or to gasp at: the Rome celebration is as breathtakingly gorgeous as any conspicuous display could ever be. Imagine having your life's work celebrated with fireworks over the Colosseum!

In another way Tyrnauer's timing wasn't so good, however. After 'Unzipped' (1995), 'Project Runway' (2005 following), two searching films about the career and life of Yves Saint Laurent (2002), 'The Devil Wears Prada' (2006), and the recent down-market but detailed chronicle of a failed fashion house launch, 'Eleven Minutes'(2008), movie-goers know a good deal about the haute couture story, so many elements and scenes of 'Valentino' are 'vieux jeux' by now, even though those of us who are fascinated by wearable art and the world of chicness will have to see it anyway.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor was just released in Canada yesterday and it was mesmerizing! The film can induce laughter and tears but its insider expose of the fashion business is pure privilege for the viewer.

Valentino Garavani and his longtime companion and business partner Giancarlo Giammetti are products of La Dolce Vita - the early 60s in Italy when all things Italian, from Vespas and Pucci to Sophia Loren and Fellini, were the definition of chic. At the height of this second Italian Renaissance Valentino emerged as a couturier, becoming internationally known when he made Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress for her marriage to Aristotle Onassis in 1968. For the next thirty years the company grew, expanding into ready to wear, accessories, and licensing, until 1998 when the company was sold for 300 million. Four years later, the company was resold, bringing Matteo Marzotto, a handsome, shrewd businessman into the picture, who at times is an antagonist to Valentino and Giancarlo.

This film captures 2006/07, before Valentino, age 75, decided to retire after celebrating his 45th year in fashion. The film also captures the death of couture, as it was defined in the 1950s by couturiers who had been trained by masters of dressmaking from the 1920s; Lagerfeld quietly whispers into Valentino's ear, thinking the microphone can not capture his words, 'You and I are the last two… everyone else makes rags.' This may sound egotistical, but its not far from the truth. Couturiers are a dying breed - in their place are designers, who make their living by branding accessories and scents while creating unwearable over-the-top creations intended as marketing opportunities for the fashion media.

This film also wryly captures the absurdity of fashion; a Fellini soundtrack plays while a string of fashion caricatures arrive at the finale dinner, from Donatella Versace and her perma-tanned skin and white-blonde hair to Karl Lagerfeld in his signature three inch tall collar and leather pants, to fan fluttering three hundred and fifty pound Andre Leon Talley. Valentino's fashion world is full of extraordinary characters; aging European princesses with bosoms bulging over their couture necklines ride on the back of Vespas like its still 1962, while cut throat businessmen make deals behind the guise of flirting smiles for the camera. Valentino tries to appear calm and in control but easily succumbs to childish temper tantrums, befitting his artistic temperament, while Giancarlo, who yields more authority over Valentino than anyone knows, tries to keep everything on an even keel.

This film is worth seeing more than once and the DVD will definitely be making a permanent home in our library!

Valentino: The Last Emperor

The best way to design a dress for a woman is to never ask her want she wants.

In fact, the only person that the dressmaker in this documentary listens to is his business partner.

Filmed over the final years of his career in the fashion industry, enigmatic designer Valentino Garavani reluctantly opens up the doors of his illustrious fashion house to the public for the first time as he preps to hang up his shears for good.

Archival footage documenting his early beginnings in Italy to his rise in popularity amongst Hollywood starlets, like Elizabeth Taylor, is interwoven with scenes of his last show in 2008, as well as in-depth interviews with some of those aforementioned celebrities, fellow designers, critics and Valentino's longtime business partner Giancarlo Giammetti to construct one compelling biography.

Moreover, Valentino is proof that a man can design a dress for a woman that isn't see-through. Green Light

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A wonderful portrait, displays several sides of Valentino from Emperor to flawed human like the rest of us. The artist, the opulent lifestyle, the dedicated partnership with his lover, the changing of the fashion business and its ramifications on this aging lion and the reality he created.

Music for the movie was perfectly selected, very well executed, edited and beautiful cinematography. This film was inspiring, funny, and touching. If your lucky enough to have Valentino in your city, hurry to the theater as it is a must see. What comes after Valentino? As he says, "The flood".