House of Gucci

"Never confuse shit with chocolate. They may look the same but they taste very different".

A girl of around 17 sat in the same row as me seemed to think that this was the funniest movie ever made as she laughed at most of the dialogue. She even laughed when the MGM lion appeared at the start of the film! There was only the occasional moment of mirth in the film and actually I concluded it might have worked better as a full-on comedy. 

The film centres on Patrizia (Lady Gaga) who begins a relationship with  Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), law student and 50% heir to the Gucci fashion house. The romance soon becomes a struggle for control of the fashion house as Patrizia takes on Maurizio's uncle and owner of the other 50% Aldo (Al Pacino) and manipulates Maurizio's cousin and Aldo's eccentric son Paolo (Jared Leto). 

The story itself is great thanks to the complications of a huge business clashing with dramatic family dynamic and the introduction of an outside in the form of Patrizia. I didn't however feel that the story was particularly well told. It felt to me like they could have really delved into the psychologies of the characters but they just bounce off the surface- the whole thing feels pretty shallow. The tone is also inconsistent, sometimes comic, sometimes emotional, sometimes dark and never quite settling on what it wants to be. 

On the whole the cast here are superb. Adam Driver and Lady Gaga are the main focuses and have a great chemistry together. Driver is intentionally understated for the most part but still gives a worthy performance. The star turn though is from Lady Gaga who is two for two in giving stunning starring performances in her feature films. In some ways Patrizia's journey in this film is quite similar to Ally's in A Star is Born- both are ordinary women whose lives are dramatically improved by the man they fall in love with but both relationships end in dramatic fashion. In term of personality though the two are really far apart with Patrizia being utterly ruthless in getting what she wants. I found her a fascinating character and kept flipping between liking and disliking her. 

There's one other performance that stands out and that is Jared Leto's. Leto is unrecognisable in prosthetics here which makes him a strange casting choice. His performance is bizarre and I couldn't work out if it was intentionally making Paolo a really eccentric character or it was just over-the-top, bad acting. I think I'm leaning more towards the latter, especially given there's no excusing his horrendously over the top Italian accent.

The accents were something I found a bit distracting here. Clearly almost all the dialogue is supposed to have been in Italian but is translated into English, so the actors are speaking in English. But they all take on Italian accents and even randomly throw in the odd Italian word like "chow". It's an issue I have with many films and I often think it would be better if they all just stuck with the normal American accents- for me, that doesn't feel any more distracting than everyone putting on Italian accents that they don't have. 

Mostly great performances and certainly an interesting story but on the whole a bit underwhelming and I just had the sense the story could have been told in a more interesting way.