Missy Shana

Valentino: The Last Emperor is a great documentary style movie about Valentino Garavani, the Italian fashion designer and founder of the Valentino Fashion House. It is very real, humorous, and witty.

The movie follows Valentino, his partner of 50 years Giancarlo Giammetti and their team as they prepare for a fashion show and the 45th anniversary of the Valentino brand. The vibe of the movie is very casual, you even get to witness Valentino and Giancarlo bicker back and forth about whose gut sticks out the most. Even the tiniest details and brought to the cameras attention, such as the grass on their lawn being spray painted green for their upcoming party, and Valentino’s dogs peeing on the set of a photo shoot. It was all very candid but the filming was still exceptional — shot in wide screen high-def, with occasional flash backs to videos from Hollywood starlets from the 50’s and onward (ex. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis & Elizabeth Taylor).

One last interesting tid-bit of information about the movie is, since Valentino and his partner are from Italy they mostly communicate with each other in Italian, but in his early years in fashion Valentino worked in Paris where he spoke fluent french, so from time to time you hear him addressing people in french, and since English is the number one spoken language in the world, he is obviously very well versed in it too. So throughout the movie you hear a lot of Italian, a bit of french and occasionally an English sentence or two, all accompanied by very skinny, white, English subtitles.

Posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 12:54 pm. Uncategorized.