Brunello The Gracious Visionary: We Don’t Just Talk about Him, We Laud Him!
By Chris Knight
Rating: C+
Show me an evil man, and I want to know how he got that way. I would gladly watch a documentary on the childhood of any fascist leader or strongman, past or present, you’d care to mention.
But give me a good man, and I become much more interested in the adult years. If he’s still alive, what’s he up to today?
One of the problems with Brunello: The Gracious Visionary is that it spends the first half of its 127-minute runtime (that’s another problem) on the penurious Italian childhood of future fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli.
It’s beautifully shot on gorgeous sets, as befits a vanity project that was commissioned and produced by its subject — another problem — but it’s boring as inferno.
“I never saw my parents fight,” says Cucinelli-as-narrator, wandering unseen through scenes of his youth like a beneficent Ebenezer Scrooge. “There was always joy.”
Little Cucinelli stays up all night looking at the stars, and is inculcated in literary classics by his mother and uncle. He plays a lot of Scopa, a centuries-old card game that serves a little too neatly as the film’s leitmotif. (Another problem.)
When he finally reaches maturity, falls in love and starts his fashion empire — well, I didn’t need to know that his first daughter was conceived amidst his stock of cashmere pullovers, eww, but the story gets a lot more interesting, and it stays that way.
Employees, family members, customers, peers and Oprah Winfrey all weigh in on his practice of “humanistic capitalism” that includes paying his workers competitive wages, and ploughing a healthy dose of his profits back into the community, fixing up grand antique buildings, and erecting new ones.
We learn that on the Ides of March 2020 he announced — in Italy, western epicentre of the pandemic — that he would not lay off any workers for the next two years, nor cut their pay, come what may. (A respectful 2010 New Yorker article notes that he had the same reaction during the 2008 financial crisis.)
The movie was lovingly directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, whose tales of childhood innocence and experience include Cinema Paradiso, The Legend of 1900 and Malena. By the end of it, I was jotting down in my notes “He’s a good man,” just about the same time that the 72-year-old Cucinelli mentions that he would be happy with “He was a good man” as his epitaph.
I couldn’t agree more. But I didn’t need so much time to get to that opinion. Eighty minutes could have covered it.
Brunello: The Gracious Visionary. Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. With Francesco Ferroni, and Brunello Cucinelli. In theatres July 24.