We will always have great friends.

At the beginning of DiamantiFerzan Özpetek celebrates a lunch with the actresses he's worked with during his career in Italy to convey his desire to reunite them all for a new film. It's a sequence that would normally be reserved for icons who need no introduction, but it seems somewhat odd considering that, outside Italy, neither the bulk of the cast nor the director of Turkish origin hold a central place in the cinephile imagination. Despite this, Özpetek's conviction in the film she is dreaming of is such that it has no difficulty in leading the audience beyond the metatextual whim and into pure fiction, which takes place in the seventies, between the walls of a sewing workshop for film and theater, run by the sisters Trinne and R. They, and the women around them, are in charge of materializing the dresses that give flight and color to the desires of others, devoting themselves with self-denial to the task, despite the dramas that each one may have at home, be it depressed children or abusive husbands.

We could reproach Diamanti that it is a film as obvious as the metaphor that gives it its title, referring to the resilient brilliance of the characters, but it cannot be denied that it is exactly the film it wants to be: a transparent idealization of the feminine universe, of its complicit solidarity, disarming due to the loving happiness with which Özpetek films the faces of his stars.