The next time you come home with sore, blistered feet after a long day, take heart: It’s not your feet that are the problem. They are your shoes.
And that comes from the master, the late Salvatore Ferragamo, who declares in director Luca Guadagnino’s loving documentary “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” that throughout his career, “I’ve discovered there are no bad feet. There are bad shoes.
Now, whether you can afford a pair of Ferragamos to let your feet live their best life is another question. But it is fascinating to know how obsessively Ferragamo, born into a family of poor Italian farmers in the early 20th century, studied the human foot in search of it to create the perfect shoe, combining creativity with, more importantly, comfort. . “I love feet,” he wrote. “They talk to me.” He even studied anatomy as a night student at the University of Southern California, bombarding the professor with questions about the skeleton, but only about the feet.
That’s just one of countless delightful anecdotes contained in Guadagnino’s often riveting, unabashedly adorable, and also perhaps overstuffed study of the designer, using Ferragamo’s own voice from the recordings, and his 1955 memoir narrated by actor Michael Stuhlbarg. Working with the Ferragamo family, the director had an astonishing wealth of material to choose from: between the family foundation and museum archives, numerous family members to interview, a host of prominent cultural commentators, and also some wonderful vintage footage from Hollywood, you can almost feel Guadagnino strives to include it all. On the other hand, he knows that some of us might watch movies about Hollywood, about fashion, and especially about great shoes all day long.
And these ARE great shoes, especially if you like shoes that tell a story. For example, the famous “rainbow” shoe produced in the late 1930s, a shimmering gold sandal set on a platform of layers of suede over a sole made of cork, a welcome innovation at a time when leather was hard to find. get (Ferragamo pioneered platform soles and wedge heels). Shoe lovers will enjoy a segment where we see how this shoe is built today, looking strikingly contemporary, step by step: the cutting, the gluing, the hammering. (The shoe later stars in its own mini-movie, a whimsical animated “shoe ballet” that closes the documentary.)
Then there’s the almost dangerously sexy and rebellious shoe worn by Gloria Swanson in 1928’s “Sadie Thompson,” a pair of high-heeled black pumps with an ankle strap and big white bows that scream, “Look at me!”
However, we begin with Ferragamo’s youth as the eleventh of 14 children, in Bonito, a town near Naples. Rejecting his father’s opinion that shoemaking is a humble career, he proves his worth by producing a fancy pair of shoes overnight for his sister’s confirmation. He becomes an apprentice shoemaker at the age of nine, makes shoes at 11, and at 16 boards a ship bound for the United States. After a brief stop in Boston, he boards a train and heads west to Santa Barbara, California, where a fledgling movie industry is sprouting. As director Martin Scorsese, the best of many commentators here in California, says, “anything goes. You could do more than three or four times.”
Watching early westerns, Ferragamo knows he could make better cowboy boots, and he does. He then graduates to all manner of movie shoes, including 12,000 sandals for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent epic “The Ten Commandments.” His name grows and his fans include the biggest stars of the day: Swanson, Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks (and in later years, everyone from Greta Garbo to Audrey Hepburn to Marilyn Monroe). He moves to Hollywood, where he lives. near Charlie Chaplin and Valentino he happens to chat in Italian. He sets up his own tent, a magnet to the stars.
Guadagnino gives us a lesson in Hollywood history, not to mention the birth of the “movie star” and the role fashion has played in that. (It is fun). Then in 1927 Ferragamo returns to Italy, choosing Florence as the base for his plan to use Italian artisan labor to make shoes destined for customers in the US. It’s a plan fraught with risks and early setbacks. In 1933 he declares bankruptcy, then rebuilds and finally buys a lavish 13th-century palazzo for his company: a triumph of self-confidence.
Despite the seemingly innumerable interviews with the family, there is still a feeling that we are not always delving into the character or personal life of the man. That finally changes when, at the end of the film, through beautiful footage shot by Ferragamo himself, we meet his girlfriend, Wanda, a young woman from his town.
It is Wanda who, as a 38-year-old mother of six, will take over the business when her husband dies suddenly of illness in 1960, overseeing an expansion into a global luxury brand. But that is not covered here. Wanda Ferragamo died in 2018, aged 96 (she luckily had been interviewed for the film), and her years at the top of a business empire without ever having worked in her life would have been a fascinating element of it. this story.
But that will have to be another movie.
“Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” has been rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America “for smoking and a suggestive reference.” Duration: 120 minutes. two and a half stars out of four.
MPAA Definition of PG: Parental guidance suggested.
Source: news.google.com