If you keep thinking about the film you watched, you probably didn’t waste your time, even if you can’t answer definitely whether you liked it or not. The recently released biographical crime drama House of Gucci was the case for me. Based on a book and directed by Riddley Scott, the film follows the lives of several members of the Gucci family during the period before they lost control of the fashion house in the 1990s. What I certainly liked was the connection between the opening and closing scenes, the ambiguity of the characters and the acting. I was particularly impressed by Jared Leto, whom I didn’t recognize as Paolo Gucci despite the fact that I knew he was in the cast, and Lady Gaga, whose portrayal of Mauricio Gucci’s wife evoked the image of Rosalia from the classic 1961 Divorzio all’italiana.
Curiously, a few days after watching the film I came across the newly released video of the song Merry Christmas by Ed Sheeran and Elton John, in which they are both dressed in Gucci. Outfits aside, I liked the life-affirming lyrics, one of Elton John’s lines in particular: ‘I wish you could see you through my eyes then you would know/ My god you look beautiful right now’. The idea has been expressed in different ways in other songs, and it made me think of the episode at the end of Breaking Dawn, the fourth novel of the vampire-themed Twilight Saga, where Bella allows Edward to read her mind so that he can finally realise how much she cares for him.
Speaking of Twilight, I have always thought there is more to the novel series than some might say. For instance, it introduced me to the poem Fire and Ice by the American poet Robert Frost. By the way, last academic year one of my first-year students chose Frost’s The Road Not Taken for our annual phonetic contest. As for the screen adaptation of Twilight, it showed me the beauty of the American north-west coast, the Olympic peninsula in particular, and made me see Kristen Stewart’s talent. Incidentally, the actress stars as Princess Diana in the recently released film Spencer, which I also had mixed feelings about and which my mind kept going back to.
The action takes place at Sandringham House, the royal estate in Norfolk where the Queen traditionally holds a pre-Christmas lunch. It reminded me of Never Let Me Go, a beautiful dystopian novel by the Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, which I read and discussed with my second-year students last year and which features Norfolk too. As for Spencer, the film brought into my mind the passage from Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls in which he observes that even a perishing man demands love, wondering if it’s an animal instinct or the soul’s feeble plea for rescue. Anyway, it feels like the right moment to go back to the song and quote one of Ed Sheeran’s verses:
So kiss me under the mistletoe
Pour out the wine let’s toast and pray for December snow
I know there’s been pain this year but it’s time to let it go
Next year you never know, but for now
Merry Christmas
24/12/2021
/Photo by my soulsister/