The 'Cinema Paradiso' director doesn't even attempt objectivity in this gilded semi-documentary account of designer Brunello Cucinelli's rags-to-riches rise.
Plus IconTodd Gilchrist
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Courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment As a design house, Brunello Cucinelli is a name synonymous with luxury and quality. As a production company, it’s hard to know how to feel about it preceding a biographical film about its namesake. “Brunello: The Gracious Visionary” tells the story of the fashion luminary from his humble beginnings in rural Perugia, Italy to the heights of his success as an international tastemaker and proponent of what he calls “humanistic capitalism.”
Described by veteran Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”) as “neither a documentary, nor a feature film, nor a commercial,” it qualifies best as hagiography. But with as skilled a filmmaker at the helm as Cucinelli is a designer and entrepreneur, one may not mind being swept along by its rhapsodic portrait, even if you quickly become convinced that “The Gracious Visionary” is too generous to be fully honest about its subject.
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