Fashioning a murder
HOUSE OF GUCCI
Cert 15 ★★★ In cinemas now
Mud baths, black magic and murder... according to Ridley Scott’s muddled true-crime thriller, there was a lot going on behind the scenes at Gucci. This strangerthan-fiction true story charts the deep fissures that opened up in the fashion house in the 80s and early 90s.
Scott traces the weirdness back to 1978 when ambitious young socialite Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) busts some energetic moves for serious young law student Maurizio (Adam Driver) in a Milan disco.
He thinks she looks like Elizabeth Taylor, she knows he’s heir apparent to a multi-billion lira fashion dynasty. After a brief period of enthusiastic stalking, she makes him her Richard Burton.
Sadly, her charms have little effect on Maurizio’s snooty dad Rodolfo ( Jeremy Irons). Thinking Patrizia is after Maurizio’s money, Rodolfo disinherits him before she can make it down the aisle.
Undeterred, she turns to Maurizio’s uncle Aldo (Al Pacino), the genius responsible for refocusing the business from over-priced loafers to over-priced handbags. He then hands estranged Maurizio a plum job in New York.
“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. There’s a wonderfully weird scene where Patrizia enjoys a mud bath with her personal fortune teller (Salma Hayek) while discussing the relative merits of rubbing someone out with curses or assassins’ bullets. It’s funny because they play it so straight.
Leto has other ideas though, going the full prosciutto as a camp Chico Marx. He seems to think he’s in an entirely different production, possibly an episode of ’Allo ’Allo!
The bizarre story was never going to be boring but this version fails to settle on a tone.
It’s like Jared Leto is in an entirely different production... like ’Allo ’Allo