Short Takes: Valentino: The Last Emporer; Sugar
VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR
One of the year's surprise hits in limited release, Matt Tyrnauer's documentary hails the end of an era: the 45-year reign of Valentino Garavani atop the House of Valentino. Best known to non-fashionistas for designing a wardrobe for the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, the 75-year-old couturier hews to the elegant interplay of line and motion, expressing his distaste for dresses that show a woman's ankles when she walks. Having weathered the industry's shifting focus from singular design to brand-name licensing, Valentino now faces the prospect of corporate supervision, and the bottom line simply isn't in his sketchbook. Tyrnauer, a Vanity Fair correspondent, follows the legendary designer through preparations for his spectacular 2007 celebration gala, for which nothing less than gowned models suspended in mid-air before the Coliseum will do. Comparisons to the elegiac ballroom setpiece that concludes Visconti's The Leopard are not inapt. For all the movie's celebrity cameos, its most elusive, compelling figures remain the master and his longtime lover, partner and business strategist, Giancarlo Giametti, whose clear-eyed devotion surpasses even the director's. Asked by an interviewer to supply one word to describe living his life in another man's shadow, Giametti replies with a wry smile, "Happiness." (Opens Friday at The Belcourt) JIM RIDLEY
SUGAR
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the most clichéd genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting and visual beauty. Half Nelson—their 2006 feature debut about a white middle-class basehead who teaches poor African-American kids—is free of Dangerous Minds–like hooey. Sugar tackles even hoarier terrain: the sports movie and the immigrant story. While certainly diamond-specific, Sugar is less about America's pastime than the fallacies of the American dream. Miguel "Sugar" Santos (the remarkable nonprofessional actor Algenis Perez Soto), a 19-year-old star pitcher in the Dominican Republic, impresses a gringo talent scout with his curveball and is invited to spring training in Phoenix, quickly advancing to a single-A team in Iowa. In the States, Sugar grows increasingly isolated by language and Corn Belt custom. Fleck and Boden capture certain believable heartland specifics: a racist scuffle in a club, misunderstood signals from a church-group-leading teenager, and a fluid, back-of-the-head long take as Sugar ambles through several different neon-nightmare video arcades. It's no spoiler to say that Sugar doesn't lead his team to victory. In their subversion of "inspirational" genres, Boden and Fleck don't want us to be any less moved by the struggles of their protagonists. They simply insist that tidy redemptions have no place in a complicated world. (Opens Friday at The Belcourt; see the longer review online at nashvillescene.com) MELISSA ANDERSON
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