‘Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams’ Review: Luca Guadagnino Lovingly Lionizes Ferragamo
thewrap.comth-century immigration, youthful ambition, the dawn of Hollywood, passionate artistic hunger, tenacity, foot fascination and wild innovation.
Thus Guadagnino’s carefully and lovingly detailed history lesson, free of stylistic flourishes, is as satisfying and methodical as that red shoe–making.This early nod to “The Wizard of Oz” is appropriate, too, as Ferragamo’s trajectory encompasses both the groundbreaking, rainbow-patterned, cork-heeled platform sandal he designed in 1938, reportedly for Judy Garland herself, and a teenage uprooting that not so faintly resembles that of the fictional Dorothy Gale, the smalltown girl dropped into an alien Technicolor environment.Born in 1898 to a farm family of 14 children in the village of Bonito, Italy, Ferragamo was fascinated by the neighborhood cobbler and spent hours watching and learning until, as a nine-year-old, he made his first shoes for his sisters’ Communion.
Then he left home, determined to study shoemaking in Naples. Which he did. At age 10.Then he returned home to Bonito to open his own shop.
He was 12.By 1915, aged 17, the prodigy was on a ship to the United States, where he promptly turned up his nose at the mass production of shoes he witnessed on the east coast (describing them as “brutal” and “clumsy” in voiceover narration from Michael Stuhlbarg).
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