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.
Born in 1956, Cucinelli grew up on a farm where he learned important lessons from rustic living; daily meals around the family table cultivated an appreciation for the wisdom (and company) of his elders, while the responsibilities of making straight furrows while plowing the family fields taught him the value of beauty. Tornatore enlists Cucinelli to narrate his childhood, then recreates it in vivid detail so the designer can literally walk back through his own memories. It’s the sort of nostalgia at which the filmmaker excels, and you can practically feel the earthy heat, emanating from the downstairs cowshed, that kept the young boy and his relatives warm during the winter.
