HOUSE OF GUCCI
Cert 15 ★★★ In cinemas now
If you’re hooked on Sky’s Atlantic’s Succession, here’s another helping of boardroom shenanigans and corporate betrayals. But there’s a soapier feel to Ridley Scott’s engaging but muddled true-crime saga. The backcombed barnets, gravity-defying shoulder pads and over-the-top performances wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Dynasty.
The film, based on Sara Gay Forden’s book of the same name, plays out between the 70s and 90s as deep fissures open up in the Gucci fashion house.
The first crack appears when Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), heir apparent to the family business and grandson of founder Guccio, meets the ambitious Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) at a disco.
When she hears his famous surname, Patrizia breaks into a wolfish smile.
The young woman worms her way into his affections and incurs the snotty disdain of Maurizio’s father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons).
Believing that Reggiani, a secretary in her dad’s haulage business, is after his money, Rodolfo cuts his son out of the business when the couple get married.
Undeterred, Patrizia befriends Maurizio’s uncle Aldo (Al Pacino) who owns half of the family business and lands Maurizio a job.
“It’s time to take out the trash,” she tells her husband when she learns that Aldo’s son and Maurizio’s dopey cousin Paolo (an unrecognisable Jared Leto) has his own designs on Gucci.
With a generous two hours 40 minutes run time, Scott has plenty of time to set up his murderous finale. This stranger-than-fiction tale was never going to be boring but Scott fails to settle on a tone, veering wildly from camp comedy to gritty thriller.
Gaga delivers an intense performance as the unhinged schemer but she seems to be in a completely different film to Leto who hams it up mercilessly as the flamboyant Paolo.
It’s a performance made of wild gestures and an increasingly silly Italian accent.
If the dialogue was half as sharp as the suits, it might even have been funny.