‘Diamonds’ Are a Costume Shop’s Best Friend

Costuming is one of the underrated arts of the cinema, and Diamonds establishes in its opening scenes just why that is. Designing a quality costume involves a lot of sewing. Yes, there’s dazzle and diamonds and frills, but for the most part costume designers for film are highly specialized tailors. The recent surprise Italian box office hit Diamonds depicts a ’70s era workshop full of older women who have taken this career path as they go about a single high profile job.

The nature of that film? Well, we don’t really know. We never actually see any footage from it. We don’t even see the concept art for the single most important dress until the end credits. Pretty much all the action, save for a few dinner scenes, is located entirely within the costume studio itself, a bright, colorful place from the high quality fabric everywhere. The women, though, wear uniforms, and tend not to bother with a lot of makeup for long days of hard work with their hands.

Ah, what we can learn from wardrobe choices! Diamonds gets into the symbolism in the film-within-a-film, as the hostile, aggressive crevices on the heroine’s dress, for example, symbolize her emotional distance from the people around her. But this exposition regarding costume design is more superficial than you’d think. The lack of context about that film makes it tough to tell whether the managing Canova sisters, Alberta (Luisa Ranieri) and Gabriella (Jasmine Trinca) are actually exceeding their editorial mandate with the alterations when they get into conflict with other professionals working on the film. Ultimately, we know very little about how the dressmaking business is actually run save for the fact that the Canova sisters have a strong reputation.

Diamonds ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Ferzan Ozpatek
Written by: Elissa Casseri, Carlotta Corradi
Starring: Luisa Ranieri, Jasmine Trinca, Stefano Accorsi
Running time: 136 minutes

But Diamonds isn’t really about dressmaking, it’s about the dressmakers — older careerwomen. And, despite occasionally veering into melodrama, the film is at its strongest by far when it depicts the awkward chaos of just having a job. One woman has a kid that she has to bring to work, and there’s nothing zany or cute about this situation. She essentially has to tell him to go hide in a room where her bosses, the Canova sisters, won’t see him. Another woman faces prying and support from her co-workers as it becomes increasingly obvious that her husband is beating her.

Even a more cheerful storyline, like the one where an old flame comes to the costume shop under the pretext of a business acquisition deal, is presented as an uncomfortable, misguided intrusion into the working space. Lighter moments like when the women pressure a handsome deliveryman to sing for them achieve their level of levity precisely because it’s a break from work, rather than as a complication of the work.

Diamonds is for all practical purposes a depiction of an office at crunch time, with competent managers who understand that quickly communicating what needs to be done, and getting everyone on task, is how they’re going to make their quarterly goals. Talking is treated as delaying or impeding the working process. The costume shop workers are good at their job chiefly because they’re able to blind themselves to these distractions and stay in the zone as they face a looming deadline.

The irony of Diamonds is that this solid ensemble story is undercut by its framing device. Yes, for whatever reason, this film has a framing device. A director in the present day has gathered his most admired actresses together, and speculates how their willful personalities would function in the context of a seventies era costume shop. Maybe the point is to wish that actors in a movie were as focused and competent as the craft workers who work on the movie but, if so, the point is lost. Technically, then, the gorgeous period piece which necessitates the elaborate costumes is actually a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie.

And that’s just too many movies. With a 136 (!) minute runtime, I’m quite surprised this aspect of the film wasn’t just cut entirely. Tension, rush, and focus are the movie’s strongest points. Slowing it down with the framing scenes wrecks the pacing, while reminders that the story is fictional just make the problems of the costume shop feel less real. More than anything else, though, the frame adds a veneer that is pretentious and boring. Actors talk about acting all the time. Costume designers talking about costume designing, now that’s not something we see every day.