The central flaw in Matt Tyrnauer's Valentino: The Last Emperor is given away by its title. The film is so reverent, so completely in awe of its subject, that it manages to fail to develop any kind of sophisticated analysis of Valentino Garavani, the famous Italian fashion designer, as well as failing to establish why his story is relevant to anyone outside of the glitterati subculture that seems to have collected around him like celestial debris around a massive gravitational body. Esoteric subjects haven't historically been outside the ambit of documentary filmmakers and Valentino is nothing if not open about the fact that haute couture is an industry that exists exclusively to service the unreasonably rich — and it assumes, in turn, that anyone with an interest in the film will already have a passion for really fancy dresses. The question has to be asked, though: If Tyrnauer wants his audience to have taken at least a correspondence course in Valentinology, then how, exactly, will they benefit from watching his film?
It certainly won't be from the rendering of Valentino's relationship with his business partner of five decades, Giancarlo Giammetti. Though there are a handful of quietly touching moments throughout the film, Tyrnauer is always too distant to capture anything but an executive summary of his subjects’ feelings and Valentino himself never comes off as anything but selfish and impossibly vain. In other words, not the sort of man a film audience wants everything to work out for in the end (Valentino’s extensive philanthropic work is ignored). Nor will audiences watch it for the cutting insight offered into the absurd excess of Valentino's world. His six identical pug dogs and his friendship with Rosario of Bulgaria are about as eccentric as Valentino gets in the film and Tyrnauer doesn't even allude to the fashion designer's history of strange behaviour (See: driving around Rome in a bulletproof red limo when the Marxist-Leninist terrorist group Brigate Rosse were operating there, the fact that he owns a castle, etc.).
The only thing left, then, is the occasional appearance of beautiful women in pretty, pretty dresses backed by loud techno music — which might well be enough to get you through the 96-minute runtime, although if that's the case, a colouring book with pictures of your favourite horses might do the job just as readily and a fair bit cheaper to boot.
Tyrnauer himself is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that his film takes such a fiercely insular perspective and those who aren't frightened by that will probably have a fine time watching it. For anyone who isn't a fashionista or fashionista wannabe, Valentino will feel like the third act of a film they've mistakenly wandered in to; the saccharine, excessively laudatory conclusion of a man's story who, for what Tyrnauer gives us, doesn't seem to deserve it.
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