Italian
Twenty years after the cult film about the world of fashion and publishing, the new movie “The Devil Wears Prada 2” confronts us with the reality of a life marked by job insecurity, relationships, and success, undermined by the digital world, Artificial Intelligence, and the lack of support to stay true to one’s principles
I thought I would have fun like twenty years ago when I first saw The Devil Wears Prada. Well, it wasn’t like that. In fact, I had to fight all night to digest that punch in the stomach it left me with.
The film “The Devil Wears Prada 2” has a very different depth of language from its predecessor, supported by extraordinary images. One in particular shows the protagonist Miranda (Meryl Streep) alone in a beautiful deserted Galleria del Corso in Milan.
The direction
Technically, the film starts off poorly due to a very questionable dubbing, at times off-key. However, after a while you forget about it, or maybe it fixes itself, so that you end up focusing more on the visuals. And on the texts.
The words that Miranda says to Andy, under The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, are undoubtedly very impactful. But I won’t reveal them to you, don’t worry.
In the film, directed by David Frankel, Miranda organizes an exclusive dinner for the advertisers of Runway, the magazine she runs, right under the Last Supper.
Of course, all of this is the result of a cinematic reconstruction and the visual impact is powerful. And the words too. There’s nothing to say about the staging of this film except for that initially annoying dubbing.
The plot
Anyone who hasn’t seen the first film, which is now impossible given all the clips circulating on social media these months, should know that the protagonist Andrea, Andy, was for a brief period, as a young graduate aspiring journalist, the second assistant to Miranda, a powerful and envied woman, demanding and abusive. She left that position to pursue her dream of a fulfilling job as a journalist.
And in these twenty years, Andy has been very successful doing the job she has always wanted to do, journalism, and for this reason, she receives yet another award during a dinner. At the same time, she and her colleagues receive a message on their phones informing them that they have been laid off.
It is the law of the market that changes, and publishing is the first to be penalized. Andy knows this well: the print newspaper no longer sells, it is disappearing. The reading of articles is also disappearing, wherever they are positioned. Even a digital article is no longer “clicked” but only “scrolled”.
Andrea manages to find the right scoop to get his articles read, and the newspaper reaffirms its position at the center of interest in the fashion field. Until the next obstacle that Miranda will manage to overcome once again.
The film explores, in almost two hours, the important and dramatic themes of today’s life, twenty years later. At the forefront is the issue of work, precarious and poorly paid (budget cuts also affect Miranda who has to travel in economic class and eat in the company cafeteria…).
The family falling apart, when it exists, is one of the underlying themes. The economic and emotional crisis has pushed Andy to launch a takeover bid on his motherhood. (“My children live at the doctor’s, frozen”).
The crisis of publishing and that of work in general, replaced first by technology and then by artificial intelligence, is like a tsunami that overwhelms everything. Even the beautiful clothes worn by the employees of Runway, strictly designer, are second-hand, as the new assistant of Andy confesses.
Then, Andy’s rental house, with an unwatchable bathroom, from which brown water flows from the tap, makes us think that even New York, like the whole world….is a village!
The generational transition in the world of entrepreneurship, the cost of living, the desire for redemption, the search for happiness are ingredients of this film that captures the society of forty-year-olds today, while the seventy-year-olds refuse to give up.
In all this, Prada has moved.
