How to dress for the red carpet

We waited more or less until the end of the 8th.0th Venice International Film Festival try to understand this strange phenomenon that comes from outside – here, in the Lido – in the Palazzo del Cino, on the red carpet. What drives some people to step over it and “be there” is obvious – ego and the desire to appear has no boundaries and no age – but the understanding, in most cases, of who these people really are is a little less. “Who is this?”, “I have already seen him, but I don’t know who he is” – these are just some of the phrases that we heard or said ourselves. This year it was even more difficult because Hollywood this had its consequences, such as the lack of big star names. A film is a film, good or bad, depending on an objectivity that ignores personal taste, but the presence of a big name in the world of cinema can change the course of events and engage the emotions of those (and who) see it. Fortunately, independent productions exist because they are the reason for people like Ms. Giulia, 83, from Jesolo, who buys her tickets every year “for the love of cinema, yes, but above all for famous people,” she notes. While we are standing in line in front of the entrance to the Great Hall, she partially succeeded in achieving her goal. “Last year there was Brad Pitt, this year there was just the guy who played the doctor on TV (Patrick Dempsey, ed.), and also another one (Adam Driver, ed.), but I don’t remember the name,” referring to Michael Mann’s Ferrari red carpet, where they are treated as the main characters. Other performers were absent, from Penelope Cruz to Hugh Jackman, as the other red carpets were missing Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Liam Neeson and the long list of names announced by director Alberto Barbera ahead of the festival. George Clooney was in Venice for the Diane von Furstenberg Awards, where his wife Amal was also presented, but he never set foot on the Lido, causing people to talk about him more than if he had been there. The same can be said about Giorgio Armani, the king (also) of his “One Night Only at the Arsenal”, who managed to arrange on his black carpet – as always very elegant – a parade of stars from Sophia Loren to Jessica Chastain that it is impossible. mention them all.

However, several times we found ourselves on the red cape Lido, stunned by the omnipresent audience of adoring teenagers behind the barriers from dawn and hours in the sun (madness), ready to scream at the slightest movement of the hand. raised.

During these two weeks without Hollywood, at least in its presence, we saw everything: boys in colored slippers, women covered with the bare necessities, people dressed in evening clothes during the day, evening clothes during the day. We even met a Cleopatra look-alike (who told us she saw the film “in competition, but the title she gives us is nowhere to be found”) and spoke to a gentleman who is a major autograph collector. What does he do with it? We ask him. And he: “I am a very lonely person, and these names are often written in a hurry, so much so that they seem like scribbles, keep me company for a year when I see them again, and then ask them again at the next festival. . I’ve been doing this for thirty-one years.” How tender, we think, but how alarming! Thanks to him, we discover a large group of guys (we counted five) who are specialists in obtaining autographs of stars, “which we then resell on E-bay,” one of them admits to us. “Many years ago I resold Lady Gaga for two hundred euros.” Oh yeah? Still in disbelief, we head towards the entrance (we’ve lost Mrs. Julia for a while) to get to our chair. Fortunately, Sofia Coppola and Priscilla Presley appear before us, to applause, very elegant, dressed in Chanel, as well as the two main characters of her new film (Priscilla

), a very young Cailee Spaeny (in her debut in front of the camera) and Jacob Elordi. But our thoughts return for a few seconds to everything we saw there, on those few meters of the red carpet, which for many is all that then entered here, where we are, a mixture of TV presenters of today and yesterday, no better identified, changed, distorted mainly by cosmetic surgery, in which there is very little constructiveness, meteors of the present past that are still looking for light today, but there is none, the unbearable lightness of creatures that are not there, but which – alas – are, wanting to disturb Milan Kundera, who passed away a few months back and whose books we recommend you reread (or read if you’ve never done so). The lights go down, a new artistic performance begins, and that simplicity and vitality that Matteo Garrone spoke to us about a few days ago during an interview for his new, magnificent and moving film from Leone d’Oro (in any case, it will go a long way, maybe to Hollywood) I’m the captainlike the neorealism they refer to and refer to seems, unfortunately, very distant.