Ridley Scott’s pantomimey soap entertainingly tracks fractures in the fashion world as Patrizia Reggiano plots to kill her ex, Maurizio Gucci
Ridley Scott’s fantastically rackety, messy soap opera about the fall of the house of Gucci is rescued from pure silliness by Lady Gaga’s glorious performance as Patrizia Reggiani, the enraged ex-wife of Maurizio Gucci, grandson of the fashion-house founder Guccio Gucci. She singlehandedly delivers the movie from any issues about Italianface casting: only she can get away with speaking English with the comedy foreign-a accent-a. Every time Gaga comes on screen, you just can’t help grinning at her sly elegance, mischief and performance-IQ, channelling Gina Lollobrigida or Claudia Cardinale in their early-50s gamine styles. There is a truly magnificent scene in which Patrizia is wearing nothing but weapons-grade lingerie in the marital bathroom – and yet somehow Maurizio, played by Adam Driver, is somehow even more sexy in his demure monogrammed pyjamas.
Until seeing this film I had no idea that in 1995, Reggiani, through a bizarre confidante and professional psychic called Pina Auriemma, played here by Salma Hayek, paid a hitman to kill Maurizio, so incensed was Reggiani by his infidelity and the resulting divorce. It is like hearing that Karen Millen thought about whacking her husband or finding out that the retailer Michael Marks planned to garrotte Thomas Spencer outside Marble Arch tube station. But there it is.
