Watch Valentino: The Last Emperor For Free

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The priceless opportunity to crash an artist's inner sanctum and watch him at work is the considerable appeal of this documentary, whose name it appropriates, of course, from the Bernardo Bertolucci-directed Academy Award-winning film about the end of the Qing Empire in feudal China. "Valentino: The Last Emperor" allows the viewer a peak into the rarefied world of "haute coutre", where the fashion designer's latest crisis, sequins or no sequins for his latest creation, is in the process of being resolved. In a crowded room, surrounded by his minions, a typically angular model is reduced to a mannequin; her casual nudity no more titillating than a venerable nun's state of undress. The subject of the scene is that white gown, not the woman who occupies it. As she's being fitted, the model's downturned countenance of ennui de-eroticizes her nakedness. The room full of people, all tending to their appointed tasks, pay no mind to this woman in the buff, which orientates the viewer to see the model through Valentino's eyes. Perhaps a nipple ring would have destroyed the functional aspect of the model's bared breasts, but the prevailing context of her nudity blurs the male gaze, since the viewer has no corresponding stand-in within the diegesis to enjoy the female form in all its purity. The opportunities to see a naked woman of film are endless. The quotidian visage of the model deflects attention away from her; she's not in the seducing mood; she's working, and onto her clothes. To Valentino's credit, the white gown that forms around the model's diaphanous body makes her look even more desirable than the pure state she achieves through the rigorous denial of normal caloric sustenance. The nude dress upstages the nude woman. The dress does the seducing. The viewer wants that dress; the dress is the eye candy, in this instance. Finally, the emperor decrees: Let there be sequins. And we were there to see an icon put the finishing touches on his latest masterpiece. Alas, "Valentino: The Last Emperor" will irk those who can't relate, or pretend to sympathize with the problems of the rich. But wealth is beside the point in Valentino's case. Stripped of its luxurious trappings, the fashion designer's trials and tribulations should be remarkably relatable to anybody who ever created a work of art, and saw their creative control suddenly taken away from them.

Director Matt Tyrnauer never could have known when making his new documentary "Valentino: The Last Emperor" that he'd first chronicle the demise of fashion's last true self-made couturier and then release it into a world where, as former Valentino Fashion Group president Matteo Marzotto (and the film's antagonist) recently declared flatly, "luxury is over." Resisting the reality-genre conventions a 21st Century first-timer might be tempted to devolve into in shaping events to fit a narrative arc, Tyrnauer simply lifts the curtain on Valentino's gorgeous, frantic, fragile universe and watches it collapse; a dying star, shining brightest as it implodes. What began as an outgrowth of a feature story written by Tyrnauer at Vanity Fair, where he is Special Correspondent, "Valentino: The Last Emperor" vaults over similar documentary efforts that fell back on partial scripting (Madonna's 1991 "Truth or Dare") or the discomfiting exploitation of a soon-to-fail relationship (the 1995 Isaac Mizrahi doc "Unzipped," directed by Mizrahi's unseen/all-seeing boyfriend Douglas Keeve). The reasons for this success stem directly from the trust placed in Tyrnauer, who as part of the 2004 Vanity Fair piece effectively managed what Valentino's own PRs certainly could not: the news -- subsequently splashed across European broadsheets -- that Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino's multi-role partner, were gay and had been lovers for 12 years as part of their decades-long relationship. Five years later, while Italian homosexuality remains a specifically complicated knot to unravel, a paradigm shift has occurred. The presupposition that the men are gay, as are the majority of their peers and male colleagues, is a mute presence in the film, while the expressive energy of the men's post-sexual relationship drives the film and their careers equally. Despite their bickering, their constant manipulations and mutual interferences, and the unceasing Italianness of their relationship (in one priceless moment, Giammetti stops Valentino cold in the middle of berating his partner's design choices by telling him he has a belly), what makes the center of the film is their love of one another, their love of fighting one another, and their love of being slightly put-upon by the demands of the baroque splendor of their lives together; lives made together, for each other. Unable as part of their generation, as part of La Dolce Vita in the closet, unable to be the men they (or their families) might have wanted them to be, their passions manifested in the exquisite beauty of Valentino's oeuvre and the extensive wealth that Giammetti was able to amass for them from it. Enough beauty, wealth and fame on an international (Jackie, Uma, all of them in between) scale to live, as Giammetti astutely observes, "above." Valentino is "above control, above partnership" and above, for most of his career, the closet. No wonder Valentino seems happy only when Tyrnauer shows him in the mountains in Gstaad, skiing -- above indeed -- informally dressed for once, alone and beckoning Giammetti to come to him from afar. Both men seem to know, semi-consciously, that separately neither man would have been able to achieve a tenth of what they've done as a couple. In what has rightly been termed their "love story," 1 + 1 = 1,000.The film has had the bittersweet luck to have been present for the ascendancy of a new math, as European equity fund Permira makes successive hostile takeover plays for Valentino's eponymous house, a late-capitalism tsunami of Euros sweeping away Valentino and Giammetti on the eve of elaborate celebrations and the designer's swansong show. Profit margins through duty-free handbags and trading on Valentino's name are the only products of these harsh calculations, whose cold logic is revealed later to show no mercy to the mercenaries brought in to do Permira's bidding. Tyrnauer, whose deft cameraman is seemingly everywhere at once thanks to top-shelf editing, wryly shows how these backstage machinations among unspeakable grandeur serve to further compress the schedule and increase the opulence of Valentino's farewell and farewell collection. Here, the film spends as much time in the château with Joan Collins and the Comtesse de Ribes as it does tender, thoughtful time with the house's incredible team of harried and largely unsung seamstresses. Hand-stitching be damned, the new regime looms, and Valentino's house, the last of its kind, will soon float away like the ironically apt motif of the hot air balloon chosen for the final season. It rises, lingers beautifully, and inevitably floats out of reach. As Giammetti says in closing the celebration and the film, "It was beautiful." He says more than he'll ever know. As multiple fashion luminaries comment throughout the film, the end of Valentino is the end of couture. (Lagerfeld and Armani seem to be out of competition, and aren't couturiers per se.) The current economic turmoil and the underlying social upheaval it implies have sealed present-day couture's fate for good. Conspicious consumption and the chicanery that funds it is done for a generation or more. Italy's crown jewel industry is in tatters, waiting for government handouts; multiple fashion houses are ruined. Permira's wager on raping the name that Valentino and Giammetti built over 50 years has been called in at the sum of hundreds of millions of Euros when it recently wrote down much of the value of Valentino Fashion Group. We'll go back -- hopefully -- to a time when fashion becomes a meritocracy again and conglomerate oligarchs have no place in whatever remains of haute couture. Valentino and Giammetti have left the party with one final, masterful flourish; Tyrnauer begins a new career having been there to capture its glory. It was beautiful.

You already know you ought to watch out when a documentary's subtitle borders on pretentious, as in the case of Valentino: The Last Emperor, which shamelessly rips off Bernardo Bertolucci's Oscar-winning epic. Sure, it might have been an attempt on the director's part to give the film extra glamor, but it also makes the huge disappointment much harder to swallow: this film gets its wrong so badly it even makes Oliver Stone's flawed Alexander biopic look like Lawrence of Arabia in comparison.But maybe that's a little harsh. Maybe the hyperbolic title is justified, since the movie's subject matter, Italian designer Valentino Garavani (know only as Valentino to the entire world), is considered the single most important person in the fashion industry of the 20th century. The film aims to show the last days of his "empire" and the party he organized for his retirement, an event which was attended by nearly all the celebrities (mostly film stars) he has dressed over the years. We also get to see glimpses of his personal life, thanks to recollections of how he got started, images of him playing with his dogs and interviews with people such as his business (and life) partner Giancarlo Giammetti. All of this is meant to come together in a vast, respectful portrait of a living legend of sorts.Why doesn't this happen, then? Well, primarily because the documentary doesn't have a real ark. Aside from when it focuses on the party and its aftermath, the movie consists of a series of clips or interviews which have no coherent link between them. Perhaps this is deliberate, given some scenes try to capture Valentino's famous mood swings, but the depiction that emerges is as lifeless as the fashion king's face (the latter is due to excessive surgery). Throughout the film he speaks Italian, English and French, but fails to convey any real emotions in either language.In the end, though, the man himself isn't to blame. The problem lies with the director, Matt Tyrnauer, whose biggest defect is the fact that he isn't a filmmaker, but a Vanity Fair journalist. Because of this background, the film isn't as much a tribute as it is a clumsy attempt at sucking-up, which results in the sorry mess Tyrnauer tried to pass off as a proper documentary (how it managed to be selected at the Venice Film Festival, we'll probably never know). Not counting the stylish opening credits, there's absolutely nothing worth seeing here.4,5/10

I agree, I saw the movie at Hamptons Film Fest and everybody was astonish in many ways. Such a great designer doing such a movie. The director is not working at all and the editing is really bad and the cinematography is really bad too. The music is grotesque and does not help the situation at all. I did not understand the reason to do a movie like this. It seems it' s been made to destroy his myth. I really hoped the director was more inspired by Valentino. And the title...please...it' s really embarrassing in 2008. More than pretentious. We prefer to remember Valentino for his dresses or red dresses, more than remember Valentino as a grotesque actor.