Fashion Beasts

Just back from HOUSE OF GUCCI. Unexpectedly packed, even on a weekday afternoon, which presumably implies it’s a hit. Couldn’t even get two seats together, but after the BBFC certificate appeared there was still one vacant seat next to Fiona so I got into it.

It’s not bad. My trouble was we’ve started watching Succession, finally, and the writing in that is so much better, the Ridley Scott movie pales a bit, even though it’s much better looking. But not THAT good-looking. Very plush, very desaturated and metallic, very dark. But not a lot of exciting filmmaking on display. It moves quite slowly. The actors all seem to be in separate worlds. They’re all giving very good performances within those worlds, but because they don’t connect, the film never gathers energy.

Lady Gaga is the most compelling; Jared Leto, disguised as Inspector Clouseau’s lounge lizard disguise from RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER, brings the entertainment. And, next to him, Pacino seems to be underplaying, so that’s sort of a bonus.

There are some very funny lines, but most of them seem to be predicated on the idea that Leto’s character doesn’t speak good Italian (which the film is translating for us, using movie magic — it’s one of those films where everyone SHOULD be speaking a different language, so they settle for pretending to have accents). It’s true, some people don’t speak their own language well, but would Paolo really have said, in his own native tongue, “If you coulda smell between my groins, you woulda unnerstan'”? It feels like, if you can write funny stuff like that (I laughed), you could, with a little more care, write lines that the character in question might say.

“Ridley Scott must really love Donna Summer,” whispered Fiona, “because he uses her A LOT.” It’s kind of hard to imagine Sir Rid on the dance floor, and I sort of wonder if he uses her a lot because it’s easy shorthand for the seventies. Most of the songs in this are very easy choices, though I respect them for using Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes rather than the same album’s Fashion. So we know it’s not a Robert Zemeckis movie, no way could he have resisted that.

Not a Tom Ford movie either, a movie with Tom Ford in it as a character — and they’re pretty careful how they handle him, which is fair enough. The film only mocks the dead or criminally convicted, which is pretty much everyone else. It’s most of the population of most of Scott’s films, in fact, which, taken as an oeuvre, are surprisingly bleak, negative and hopeless. Surprising since he’s such a commercial presence. But maybe the idea that what we want is optimistic stories of triumph has always been wrong.

Consider the animated ident of Scott Free Productions. A raincoated man flaps about in what sounds like a darkened lavatory, then turns into a bird and freezes, having run out of animation and becomes a lifeless logo at exactly the point of taking flight, the words “Scott Free” appearing beneath him as a kind of cruel jibe.

Consider BLADE RUNNER, where an assassin less human than the androids he’s hunting gets rained on for two hours, then flies off with the nonhuman girl at the end into footage originally shot for THE SHINING, implying they’re going to land their hovercar at a haunted hotel… until Ridley recut it to turn the hero into a literal android.

Consider THE COUNSELLOR, which might be Scott’s ultimate statement. I didn’t like that film at all but it did seem very Ridley. A summation of sorts. Characters don’t need to have credible motivations (consider the guy making kissy faces at the hideous snake alien in PROMETHEUS which is obviously about to eat his face) so long as their improbable decisions lead to their total destruction and that of everyone they love.

The Guccis, in other words, were made to order for the Ridley Scott Cinematic Universe.