The once decadent queen is bereft. Standing outside of her husband’s home — thrust out of the castle of leather and luxury — Lady Gaga is left to pleading tears. For the majority of House of Gucci, the new Ridley Scott film tracking the descent of the family empire behind the Gucci brand, Lady Gaga’s Patrizia Reggiano is meant to serve as the movie’s central force: a savvy, opulent shark, pushing her husband Maurizio (Adam Driver), the heir to the luxury empire, to self-actualize into its new ruler. Yet, toward the end of the film, she is simply an estranged wife, desperately ambushing him with questions and, most pathetically, a photo album in-hand of their time together. Maurizio recoils in pity.
“Why are you talking to me like this?” she asks. Because, he replies, you can’t see what you’ve become. It’s a striking moment in the film for a couple reasons. For one, it is a sort of turning point — the most explicit example the film offers of what pushed Patrizia to ultimately and infamously orchestrate Maurizio’s murder. In this way, it is also inadvertently a revelation into what makes the film, adapted from the book of the same name, such a dismayingly flat, uninspired mess: like Patrizia herself, the audience isn’t sure what she’s become. The story has, to this point, offered no real sense of who she is or was, nor how and why she became the woman who would go so far as to have her husband, one of the most high-profile figures in the world of fashion, assassinated on the steps of his own home.
