THE STAGGERING GIRL by Luca Guadagnino
At the 72nd Cannes Film Festival in the section La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs - starring Julianne Moore, Kyle MacLachlan, Marthe Keller, Kiki Layne, Mia Goth and Alba Rohrwacher
A film born from the meeting between the director and the Creative Director of the Maison Valentino Pierpaolo Piccioli
The Staggering Girl directed by Luca Guadagnino will be presented at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival in the section La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. The film is the result of an artistic dialogue between the director Luca Guadagnino and the creative director of the Maison Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli: together they carry out a narrative experiment that unites the language of cinema and the language of Couture, narrating the chapters of a woman's life through the mother-daughter relationship. The exceptional cast, strongly supported by Luca Guadagnino and Pierpaolo Piccioli, gives life to a set of complex characters played by Julianne Moore, Kyle MacLachlan, Marthe Keller, Kiki Layne, Mia Goth and Alba Rohrwacher.
Moving between Rome and New York, the film tells an intimate story, made of symbols, gestures, images, the strength of the blood relationship and gender between two women who have come to terms with themselves. Valentino's Haute Couture creations run through the film, participating in its dreamlike atmosphere and amplifying, with a sophisticated visual subplot, the brilliant screenplay by Michael Mitnick, author of cult series such as Vinyl and the film The Current War. The Staggering Girl features photography by Sayombhu Mudkeeprom and original music composed by Oscar®-winning Ryuichi Sakamoto. The film is produced by Valentino SpA, Ibla Film, Frenesy Film, Rai Cinema and in collaboration with Rai Com. Rai Cinema that is always attentive to a cinema that reflects the cultural identity of our country has been the obvious partner for this project.
The Staggering Girl is currently available on MUBI in German
"A story can be told in an infinite number of ways and this was our own - explains Pierpaolo Piccioli - Each of us worked on an idea observing it from our respective points of view, encouraged by an aesthetic affinity and intentions that never failed. Luca is a subtle interpreter, who knows how to adapt to the surrounding reality an ironic and gentle sensibility at the same time. We shared our daily working life, I showed him the Haute Couture collection I was drawing, he offered me the lens of his camera to observe the scene from another perspective. Just like the collection, the film is suspended in the Kairos, the opportune moment that the person has to reflect, going back and forth in his inner time. This film is a tale apparently unrelated to the passage of time, a flow of consciousness through images and emotions. Cinema, like Haute Couture, allows time to expand into eternity, it's pure magic".
"Last summer I had the privilege of meeting Pierpaolo Piccioli in Rome in Valentino's headquarters at Palazzo Mignanelli - explains Luca Guadagnino - Pierpaolo, whose amazing art of couturier I have admired for a long time, took me through the Haute Couture atelier. The Fall/Winter 2018-19 collection was born through the tireless and sublime work of the Premiere, the seamstresses and the tailors. In that meeting with Pierpaolo we decided that we would try something that we had never tried before, making a film based on an Haute Couture collection. The artistic and emotional depth, the transfiguring capacity of Pierpaolo Piccioli's work were the 'text', like a great novel, on which base the script of this dreamed film. From this meeting and from the triangulation between Pierpaolo Piccioli, the brilliant screenwriter Michael Mitnick and me this short film is born". - Luca Guadagnino