“Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.” Sylvia Plath
Last night Miu Miu screened four short films at the 69th Venice Film Festival, a celebration of the brand’s unique girl-power series The Women’s Tales. The point was to premiere the fourth instalment, It’s Getting Late, by Iranian/ American screenwriter Massy Tadjedin, starring i-D girls Gemma Arterton and Rinko Kikuchi alongside Patricia Clarkson, Aubrey Plaza and Zola Jesus (as her good self). The film depicts four women: one high-flyer, one stay at home mother, one blogger and one film editor, living in different parts of the world with totally different lives, but the idea being they all like Zola Jesus, and all end up at her gig, in Miu Miu shades course.
After the premiere, part I, II and III of The Women’s Tales filled the big screen, stories about proper ‘femme fatales’, exquisite creatures with a freak streak. In director Lucrecia Martel’s film Muta, beautiful faceless girls wearing Miu Miu emerge from cabin doors on a ship the same way Samara emerges from the well in The Ring. Fluttering their eyelashes and fingers with superhuman speed and the sound of a camera shutter, they glide around the boat disciplining each other, silently plotting some world domination. Then in Giada Colagrande’s dark fairytale The Woman Dress, actress Maya Sansa is led to a bath by three fashion witches who prick her finger and encircle her, chanting in a backward language, until she dissolves into the bath and transforms into a red lace dress. Slightly lighter, director Zoe Cassavetes’s The Powder Room, set in London’s Claridges Hotel, shows a host of hot Miu Miu women finishing their makeup and throwing their hair around, quietly aware of eachother.
Exploring femininity, solidarity and the mystical powers of the female race, the films were the perfect advocate for narrative in fashion film, a decisive step in the narrative/ no narrative debate. Wearing patent red and black brogues, Miuccia Prada looked well pleased, the last to leave the theatre with friends including artist Francesco Vezzoli and actor Willem Dafoe, who made his catwalk debut at the AW12 Prada men’s show in Milan earlier this year. Following an incredible 2012 for Prada with the 24 hour museum in Paris and the most exciting menswear show of the season, the Venice screenings just reaffirmed their status as the best: a multi-faceted brand leading the way into the digital future.
Text: Sarah Raphael
