Shaduppa You Face!
British Vogue’s December edition features a cover and profile of Lady Gaga, just in time for the release of Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. Based on the book House of Gucci: A sensational story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed, the film tells the true-crime story of Patrizia Reggiani hiring a hit man to take out her husband Maurizio Gucci.
Back in the day, I could get excited about a movie like House of Gucci. Any film featuring decadent, fabulously turned-out, temperamental, larger than life, husband-murdering socialites constituted a guaranteed guilty pleasure in the vein of Real Housewives. Patrizia was the primordial ‘real housewife;’ the primogenitor who makes her primogenitees look as restrained and austere as Amish school teachers. In Real Housewives, the ‘husband-murdering’ is metaphorical.
Yet the prospect of seeing this film leaves me emptier than an Italian piazza during lockdown. With unencumbered access to the Gucci archives, the wardrobes will certainly be contending for ‘Oscar.’ Though I’m not sure the Gucci of Patrizia Reggiano’s world still exists. That was the old Gucci. This is the new Gucci:
Movies are mostly underwhelming these days anyway. Movies in which American actors put on thick accents—as well as biopics and anything starring Ewan MacGregor— always underwhelm me. Non-Italian actors simply cannot pull off an authentic Italian accent and Lady Gaga’s sounds about as Italian as stuffed-crust pizza.
Fake accents have delivered some of the cringiest moments in cinematic history. Remember Mickey Rooney’s buck-tooth portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Or Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent in Mary Poppins, for which he formally apologized? Hollywood never learns its lessons.
Italians must be so tired of seeing American actors who talk-a-like-a-this. Nicolas Cage’s ‘Italian’ accent in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin veers toward a provocation for war. Actually, it veers all over the map, sounding sometimes Spanish, sometimes Indian and for a brief second… Chinese. Mostly Cage’s accent sounds Transylvanian, like Sesame Street’s The Count. One! One scathing review! Two! Two scathing reviews! Three! Three scathing reviews! Ah ah ah ah!.