The Armani beauty Venice Film Festival partnership returned for its ninth consecutive year this week, as the 83rd Venice Film Festival opened on Wednesday evening, according to UA.NEWS, bringing with it a red carpet, an intimate garden dinner, a new men’s fragrance, and at least one moment of genuine, uncalculated feeling.
Venice invites this kind of thing. Only 50,000 people live on the island proper, yet as a cinematic setting it has rivalled Paris, New York and Los Angeles across a century of filmmaking. From Don’t Look Now and Death in Venice to James Bond, Indiana Jones and Ocean’s Eleven, directors return to it compulsively. The reason is not hard to locate: Venice is so implausible in its beauty that it resists being fully believed even when you are standing in it. Walk five minutes from the famous sights and you are in the same near-silent piazzas and canalside paths that once compelled Daphne du Maurier and Thomas Mann. It is, in that sense, the ideal city for a film festival, and for a brand that has spent decades at the intersection of cinema and dress.
Armani beauty Venice Film Festival: nine years of official partnership
Armani has contributed costume design to over 100 films, Richard Gere’s suit in American Gigolo, The Untouchables, The Dark Knight among them, and the beauty partnership with Venice feels continuous with that history rather than separate from it. This year, the brand used the festival to launch I WILL Eau de Parfum, its new men’s fragrance, presenting it via a private screening of the I WILL campaign film starring Jonathan Bailey. The wider week assembled Armani’s global ambassadors, Bailey, Kendall Jenner, Vittoria Ceretti, Nicholas Galitzine, Sydney Sweeney, Madisin Rian, Carlos Sainz, J. Balvin, Blanca Suárez and Luca Argentero, at a dinner in the gardens of the Royal Gardens, where they sat together at one long table. Word Power’s correspondent notes, with appropriate deadpan, that this technically allows one to say one had dinner with Kendall Jenner.
On the opening night, Armani provided official make-up services to guests at the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido, a grand building above the beach that has served as a backdrop to the festival’s glamour for decades. Getting separated from one’s group, it turned out, means being bundled to the side by security rather than walking the carpet, which, on reflection, may be the more instructive vantage point. Watching the machinery of celebrity at close range, the overwhelming impression is of a great deal of patient waiting in a very beautiful place.
Danny Boyle, a Golden Lion and the weight of a real story
The festival opened with Ink, a period drama set in 1970 chronicling Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun in 1969, as new owner Murdoch (Guy Pearce) and editor Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) pursue increasingly extreme tactics to dethrone the Daily Mirror as Britain’s top-selling paper. Halfway through, the film pivots into a hostage thriller, drawing on events so improbable they require the reassurance of being true, as ABC News notes in its coverage of the opening. O’Connell, Pearce and Claire Foy give performances described as powerhouse, O’Connell, in particular, read as a leading man who has arrived. The reservations are structural: Danny Boyle’s signature toolkit of flashing text, vertiginous angles and thumping rock montages can feel more reflexive than necessary. Four stars, nonetheless.
Before the film screened, George Clooney was presented with an honorary Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, an award confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter. Clooney’s effect on a room of otherwise composed professionals (gawping, flash photography) was, by all accounts, total. But the evening’s emotional centrepiece came from Laura Dern, who delivered a tribute drawing on more than 30 years of friendship, reading messages from Alexander Payne and Brad Pitt, among others. The speech was funny, polished and, most of all, earnest, the last quality being the rarest and the one that landed hardest. It is worth noting, for the record, that the best speeches at any ceremonial occasion function exactly like the best speeches at weddings: they make a room feel something it did not expect to feel.
Armani beauty’s I WILL Eau de Parfum is now available, with the Venice campaign film (and its rather more storied backdrop) doing the work of introduction.
