Review: With documentary 'Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams,' director Luca Guadagnino applies his artist's eye to a fashion legend
Appropriately for a movie about a fashion icon, director Luca Guadagnino’s documentary “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” is loaded with style and a bit lacking in substance.
The shoemaker in question is Salvatore Ferragamo, who made his first pairs of high heels when he was 9, for his sisters’ confirmation. He quickly progressed from being a cobbler’s apprentice in Naples to opening a store in his parents’ home — before immigrating to America, first in Boston (in a factory set-up he hated) and soon to California.
Ferragamo opened a shop in Santa Barbara, right around the time the burgeoning film industry was being established there. He started designing footwear for the movies, from cowboy boots to delicate heels. He studied anatomy at the University of Southern California, because he was convinced that shoes could be beautiful and comfortable at the same time.
When the movie industry left Santa Barbara for Hollywood, Ferragamo went with it — starting a shop that became a destination for such stars as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish and Gloria Swanson. In 1927, Ferragamo moved back to Italy, and established his namesake company in Florence — where his descendants still run things. His clientele grew to include royalty and such luminaries as Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren.
Guadagnino — known for “Call Me By Your Name,” the “Suspiria” remake and last month’s “Bones and All” — lavishes attention on Ferragamo’s shoes that human actors would envy. The film highlights many of Ferragamo’s most stylish innovations, including the “invisible” shoe (made from clear nylon filaments), the “cage” heel, the wedge (made from cork, as other materials were scarce during World War II) and the “rainbow” platform shoe.
The film is loaded with interviews with the Ferragamo family (captured mostly at a 2018 reunion), as well as designers like Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin, fashion writers Suzy Menkes and Grace Coddington, and filmmaker Martin Scorsese — who, as always, knows the best stories. Michael Stuhlbarg, one of Guadagnino’s regular actors, narrates the film, reading from Ferragamo’s memoirs.
The result is a fond look at the intersection where fashion and filmmaking meet, and how innovation and inspiration can strike anywhere — but only someone with ambition and determination can make something out of those attributes.
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‘Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams’
★★★
Opens Friday, December 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for smoking and a suggestive reference. Running time: 121 minutes; in English and Italian, with subtitles.