The new Clan Gucci film had a place in the cultural pantheon secured long before the premiere. It was enough to publish a trailer in which Lady Gaga, with a burnt-out Italian accent, says sentences like “Let’s take out the trash”, so that her slightly ironically inflamed speech immediately gets into memes, gifs and reactions. Now the whole movie is here. And it’s a little more complicated with him.
In it, Gaga plays Patricia Reggiani, the woman who planned the assassination of her ex-husband, heir to the fashion empire Maurizio Gucci, in the 1990s. But that’s the end of the film. In an adaptation of Sarah Gay Forden’s book, director Ridley Scott focuses on the power struggle within the family for control of the entire brand.
The strife in the film is initiated by Patrizia, an ordinary enterprising girl who marries Mauriz (Adam Driver) to the displeasure of his relatives. And then they all post against each other.
The Gucci clan is coming to theaters at a time when the third series of the unrivaled series Fighting for Power is already in full swing on HBO, in which one family is more or less subtly vying for succession in a media and entertainment conglomerate. If you expect something similar from the annotation in the Gucci family, let the gentle psychology get your taste in it. You will rather laugh. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. At least in the beginning.
The Gucci clan literally commands the acting of Lady Gaga, who controls the family and the film itself from the very first minutes, when she appears on absurdly high needles, goes out to hunt for a party, or has, say, very animal sex with Mauritius.
Her facial expressions are more pronounced, her crying is more sedentary and her accent is sharper. According to some voice coaches, it sounds more Russian, but that doesn’t matter at all. You can go for an idea this interview s Donatellou Versace.
As in the Struggle for Power, they also urinate on the floor in a luxurious study, but the company’s machinations are also solved through a television fortune teller.
Yes, in the Clan Gucci film, Patrizie’s main confidante is Italian Jolanda, with whom Gaga bathes in the mud and is played by Salma Hayek. It’s also nice that Scott doesn’t need to apologize to Frigate and frame her like a company-dragged heroine, as do films like Me, Tonya, the renowned figure skater Tony Harding.
In another scene, Patrizia wants to deceive Maurizio’s cousin Paolo, whom he presents unrecognizably disguised as Jared Leto in a so-called fat suite. For his accent, the Italians could easily draw a card of cultural insensitivity. Anna Wintour’s caricature is on the edge of the masquerade ball again.
However, the tact is not played here in most of the acting speeches, so it is astonishing that the film in the second half begins to delay Patricia with an emphasis on Driver’s Maurizio, so that the subsequent murder happens in the last ten minutes. The monitored trial of Patricia, in which Gaga could rule the courtroom, is then completely absent in the film.
The result thus looks like a miniseries fit into an hour and a half, from which all emotional and dramatic believability has disappeared, leaving only limited scenes full of acting excess, to which the audience can be connected only by an amused grin. And that just won’t get the mammoth footage.
The Gucci clan also seems to want to talk about how individual members of the family did not understand what the brand meant, or if they replaced its value with money, and therefore lost it again and again. This is a strong topic, but much more sensitive recently, for example, the Halston miniseries on Netflix, in which the mentioned fashion designer, due to his greed, lost control of the brand he had already created, but which no longer belonged to him.
In the final, it is not very clear what the creators are about. Lady Gaga already gives interviews on the treadmill, in which she repeats that she did not leave the role for several months, which does not yet have the cadence of her past Oscar campaigns, however, it means that she would like a golden statue this time as well.
But neither Scott nor the screenwriters support her at all, because they oppose eccentric acting performances in an unobtrusively linear and stylistically indistinct narrative, moreover cunningly faded by a gray filter and accompanied by the most obvious soundtrack with Blondie or Donna Summer.
But you may still enjoy this dumb soap opera, but if you really want to immerse yourself in the circumstances of the fashion titan’s murder, you have to look elsewhere. And you don’t have to look far. American Crime Story: The Murder of Gianni Versace, available on Netflix, is one of the best miniseries in recent years. And he has accents, too.
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