House of Gucci (dir. Ridley Scott, 2021) — Review

House of Gucci has ended up as Drag Race for the Hollywood establishment. Prosthetics by the kilogram? Check. Drama on the dancefloor? Check? Assless chaps? Big check. Gentlemen (and Gaga), start your engines.

Despite the cast’s apparent awards season strategy of covering themselves in glue and rolling through the hair and makeup trailer- special mention to Jared Leto and his claim that he “was basically snorting lines of arrabbiata”- House of Gucci salvages a shred of family dignity by the end of its near 3 hour runtime. Rather like the fashion line whose unlikely resurrection it chronicles, Ridley Scott’s latest modern drama clings onto a shred of substance under its gloriously tacky trappings, thanks to the toxicity of the domestic politics bubbling at its heart.

The plot dominated the tabloids long before the rise of social media and the 24 hour news cycle: brassy upstart Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) marries dorky law student Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), driving him like a prosecco-slurping Lady Macbeth up the ranks of the ailing family fashion house. The newlyweds’ quest to “take out the trash”, in Patrizia’s words, brings them into conflict with the rest of the Gucci family, a mob of ailing Hollywood waxworks straight out of Sunset Boulevard, with equally refined acting skills: notably, patriarch and 50% shareholder Aldo (Al Pacino) and his idiot son Paolo (Jared Leto) rear their amply siliconed heads. The film swoops by in an appalling swash of nicotine-drenched interiors, strudel-based innuendo, and joyously sloppy catwalk recreations. A particular highlight appears with the Tom Ford Gucci reinvention scene, set in 1995: in a triumph of laziness of both screenwriting and production design- surely two of the key components in a film like this- a man in the front row wonders, to his companion, “are you sure this is a Gucci show?”. He sports a bomber jacket instantly recognisable to anyone who lived in Europe between 2017 and 2019 as a £29.99 offering from Zara, which attained such ubiquity as to live, to this day, on a construction graphic at Tottenham Court Road.

One must hope, then, that underneath all this- under all the astoundingly bad Italian accents, the clunkiness of the dialogue, the tooth-gnashing soundtrack of opera classics seemingly plucked from the playlist of a suburban pizzeria- Scott and his cast had some sort of artistic vision. As with the deluded Gucci heirs, whose woeful incompetence and delusions of grandeur fall so castastrophically foul of resurrecting a good, solid leather goods brand, the intention does shine through. The lurching, hamfisted tone of the family troubles serves only to highlight the weird relatability of the characters at the film’s heart: the sad, yet apparently well-intentioned marriage of a dopey rich boy and a pushy woman.

Gaga wades in with gladiatorial aplomb, and the tension between her Patrizia and Driver’s Maurizio- the two of them flipping between loathsome, feckless greed and charming romanticism- keeps the central tension of the plot searing through its ‘somebody touch-a my spaghet’ overtones. Despite all the “junk” clogging the film, and the family name- in literal terms, the Gucci branded coffee mugs; in general, the “pints of cioccolato gelato” et al- Patrizia and Maurizio remain compelling. Patrizia, at first a hungry, borderline stalkerish woman seducing a man with an attractive surname, if little else, goes from wolfish to motherly as she draws linen-clad nerd Maurizio out of his shell. We cannot help but seethe with her as, having taken her business advice, he decamps with a horsish ‘old money’ friend who seems more suited to the slopes of St Moritz. Having offered up an opulent platter of pastels, pigeons, prizewinning Tuscan cattle, Ferraris and the like, Scott leaves it to his audience to judge the jiggling, gyrating mass of desperate parents and children, picking their way through this gauntlet of temptation- or to pity them.