“Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams,” Luca Guadagnino’s winning documentary delving into the life and career of legendary Italian shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo, begins appropriately enough with a pair of high-heeled ruby slippers in the process of creation. In seamless integration of machines and people, the sparkling red objects are made from wearable art both hand-made and mass-produced.
These opening shots, satisfying and meThodical — presented without explanation, suggesting that Guadagnino might be assuming a fly-on-the-wall approach for the duration — quickly give way to traditional documentary practices, and pleasingly so. This is history not widely known outside the world of fashion, and Ferragamo’s story is a complex intersection, touching on early-20th-century migration, youthful ambitions, the dawn Hollywood, passionate artistic hunger and tenacity. Thus Guadagnino’s carefully and lovingly detailed history lesson, free of stylistic flourishes, is as satisfying and methodical as that red shoe–making.
This was an early nod “The Wizard of Oz” is appropriate, too, as Ferragamo’s trajectory encompasses both the groundbreaking, rainbow-patterned, cork-heeled platform sandal he designed in 1938, reportedly for Judy Garland herself, and a teenage uprooting that not so faintly resembles that of the fictional Dorothy Gale, the smalltown girl dropped into an alien Technicolor environment.
Born in 1898 to a farm family of 14 children in the village of Bonito, Italy, Ferragamo was fascinated by the neighborhood cobbler and spent hours watching and learning until, as a 9-year-old, he made his first shoes for his sisters’ Communion. Ferragamo left home and set his sights on studying shoemaking in Naples. He did. He was 10 years old.
He then returned to Bonito to start his own business. He was 12.
In 1915, the 17-year old prodigy was travelling on a ship to America. There, he quickly turned his nose up at mass production of shoes on the east coast. “brutal”And “clumsy”Michael Stuhlbarg provides voiceover narration. He boarded the train to California and arrived in Santa Barbara. There he could make any kind of shoes he wanted. This led to work on silent-movie sets, producing shoes for films, enrollment at University of Southern California to study human anatomy in order to make his shoes’ arches more comfortable, and then to craft custom footwear for silent film stars like Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, and later for Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and every other woman in the movies.
Guadagnino understands Ferragamo’s life as one woven into the birth of Hollywood as a film empire, and for the way in which his shoes, marked with a name that came to stand for luxury and innovation — what costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis refers to, in interview, as “audacious footwear” — marched alongside the ascendance of movie stars as a form of American royalty.
Guadagnino gathers a wide range of archival material and interviews a number of people, including Grace Coddington, director Martin Scorsese, and fashion icons like Christian Louboutin, Manoloblahnik (the latter is the subject of this documentary). “Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards”), a chorus of praise for Ferragamo’s inventive nature, his strategic business mind, his refusal to succumb to “the temptation of the assembly line” after returning to Italy in 1926 and his determination not to fail even in the face of bankruptcy and Mussolini’s fascist government.
Risking hagiography, Guadagnino spends a significant portion of the film’s later moments recounting the designer’s warm family life, which includes glowing testimonials from Ferragamo’s own children and grandchildren, many of them still involved in the family business, and none of whom have anything to say that would counter Ferragamo’s wife Wanda’s loving accolade, that he was “as good as bread.”She added, slyly. “… hard bread.”
And that’s as big a hint as the film is willing to give that Ferragamo was ever mean or depressed or unkind like every other human being who’s ever lived. If he suffered internally, in ways similar to other famous subjects of other fashion documentaries — Halston, Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent — it’s not this film’s desire to explore it.
This is a complete tribute. “House of Gucci,” and it’s one that focuses on the best of the man, letting the legend remain legendary, culminating in a delightful animated shoe ballet and those ruby slippers clicking away. At one point, Scorsese paraphrases Bob Dylan’s assertion that the self is not found but created, and it would seem to fit here like a good shoe. Ferragamo visited Oz, studied it thoroughly, and built his own path to become the wizard.
“Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams”November 4, 2009 in US theaters via Sony Pictures Classics