Diamonds

Diamonds is a special film. It is, at times, a bit melodramatic, but only in the best sense of the word. It is inarguably passionate and darkly funny. It contains wisdom and earned space to discuss the relationships between women and between men and women. Not, however, mostly romantic, though there is some of that. Most refreshingly, it shows women as friends and family, without the cliches of deep-seated resentment or the necessity of a man to come along and rescue them from their situation or themselves.

Courtesy Outsider Films

Above all, this is a film that respects women and the role they play in our lives. Women, indeed, are jewels, who deserve a chance to sparkle and who will, the film suggests, often choose what it best for themselves and those around them. This is where it becomes a little melodramatic and almost hagiographic. The film, however, can be forgiven some degree of exaggeration and fantasy, for it is both memory and homage by its writer and director, Ferzan Ozpetek,  both to the women he has worked with and those he came from.

This film is a love letter, and one with a rare wit and insight. It is also a film where the viewer will need to allow themselves to go with the various rhythms at play, or it will be an upstream struggle. It is a bifurcated film, a film within a film, with the idea being the film’s director has gathered the women who mean the most to him, professionally, and created a film for them, one set in an Italian cinema atelier during the 1970s. The parts in the present are sometimes a little awkward, especially early on, but they serve as intellectual framing for the more emotional work occurring during the costume shop sequences.

Courtesy Outsider Films

There are many stories, including that of the two sister who own the shop, along with the cook who is den mother to the seamstresses. There is a director and the award-winning costume designer he has hired, a young woman who is hiding from the police and another who has a horrifically brutal husband. There are actors and actresses, handymen and more. This is a community, but a tight knit one, despite all the occasional friction that comes just from human beings living in close, constant contact with one another. The sisters, for instance, could not be either more different or more alike.

The film manages, here, to capture something another film about the fashion world, failed to do, which is how it makes you believe in the talents of the designers and physical builders, unlike Phantom Thread, which left this viewer puzzled as to how anyone could find those works so amazing. In that film, it appeared no more special than something one might find at Brooks Brothers, where here, there is a vitality, even in the more toned-down works. The film also succeeds in making its characters not only interesting but believable, and tying their work and personal lives together in ways that one can invest.

Courtesy Outsider FIlms

This is done in part through not only tremendous costume work, sharp direction and wonderful performances, but also by virtue of convincing sets and photography, all of which evoke the period in which the story is set while never becoming a distraction, a gimmick or so of the depiction that one disengages. Everything is calibrated to keep the viewer within the story, and it mostly works in achieving that, aside from the framing device. There, it becomes almost hagiographic in its remembrance of the past and praise of the glories of its characters, but that is a small price to pay for the pleasures contained within most of it.

Diamonds is now playing in select theaters.