Next time you arrive home with aching, blistered feet after a long day, take heart: It’s not your feet that are the problem. It’s your shoes.
And that comes from the master, the late
Now, whether you can afford a pair of Ferragamos to let your feet live their best lives is another question. But it’s fascinating to learn how obsessively Ferragamo, born into a poor Italian farming family at the turn of the 20th century, studied the human foot in his quest to create the perfect shoe, combining creativity with, crucially, comfort. “I love feet,” he wrote. “They talk to me.” He even studied anatomy as a night student at the
That's just one of countless lovely anecdotes packed into Guadagnino's often fascinating, unabashedly adoring and also perhaps somewhat overly stuffed study of the designer, using Ferragamo’s own voice from recordings, and his 1955 memoir narrated by actor
And these ARE great shoes, especially if you like shoes that tell a story. For example, the famous “rainbow” shoe produced in the late ’30s, a glistening gold sandal perched atop a platform of layered suede tiers on a sole made of cork — a welcome innovation at a time when leather could be hard to come by (Ferragamo pioneered platform soles and the wedge heel). Shoe lovers will enjoy a segment where we watch this shoe being constructed today, looking stunningly contemporary, step by step: the cutting, the gluing, the hammering. (The shoe later stars in its own mini-film, a whimsical animated “shoe ballet” closing the documentary.)
Then there's the almost dangerously, rebelliously sexy shoe worn by
We begin, though, with Ferragamo’s youth as the 11th of 14 children, in Bonito, a village near
Watching early Westerns, Ferragamo knows he could make better cowboy boots — and he does. Then he graduates to all sorts of movie shoes, including 12,000 sandals for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent epic “The Ten Commandments.” His name grows and his fans include the biggest stars of the day — Swanson,
Guadagnino gives us a lesson in the history of
Despite seemingly countless interviews with family, there's still a feeling we’re not always delving deeply into the man’s character or personal life. That finally changes when, late in the film, through lovely footage shot by Ferragamo himself, we meet his bride, Wanda, a young woman from his village.
It is Wanda who will, at 38 and a mother of six, take over the business when her husband dies suddenly of illness in 1960, overseeing an expansion into a global luxury brand. But that is not covered here.
But that will have to be another movie.
“Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” has been rated PG by the
MPAA definition of PG: Parental guidance suggested.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission., source