Diamonds / Ferzan Özpetek and the Memories of Light

Hakan Bahar on Ferzan Özpetek’s new film, Diamanti (Diamonds).

HAKAN BAHAR

I was seventeen when I first watched Ferzan Özpetek’s Hamam (Steam: The Turkish Bath). At that age I was not trying to decode a set design or understand a character’s psychology. I was only feeling — the breath of another time rising through that steam, that water, that bathhouse. The film had ended, but its echo inside me had not. For me, Hamam was less a film than a moment of awakening: it was in that film that I first understood how body, desire, space and memory touch one another. Ever since, I have looked at a garment, a house, a photograph, even a line of stitching, with that same eye — from that invisible place where the past seeps into the present.

After the many films of his I have watched with admiration over the years, when I watched Özpetek’s latest, Diamanti (Diamonds), I realised that this time light had taken the place of that steam. I was in a world where the old bathhouse walls had given way to reflections. Yet at its heart the subject was the same: that fragile reflection in which past and present blend into one another. In Diamanti, the costumes are like archaeological layers; the more they are excavated and unfolded, the more new meanings emerge. And those meanings, as always in Özpetek’s cinema, are kept in the memory of the body.

Ferzan Özpetek’s new film Diamanti places at its centre not only the stories of women, but the costumes themselves. Set in a tailoring atelier, the film brings onto the stage cinema’s invisible hero, the garment: here, dresses are not mere decor but keepers of secrets, witnesses to passions and silences, symbols of women’s solidarity. One of the words most often repeated in describing Ferzan Özpetek’s cinema is “emotion”. But these emotions belong not only to great loves or dramatic encounters; they are also the emotions of laughter around a dinner table, of secrets hidden in the fabric of a red dress, of a gaze shining under the right light. For him, cinema is a space of memory built from details.

Ferzan Özpetek’s Diamanti is not just a film; it is fabric, thread, tarlatan and the voices hidden in the shadows of a tailoring atelier, turned into cinema. This time the lead is neither a woman nor a man; the lead is a garment — or rather, the garments themselves. They fall, rise, fall silent, remember; just like the women in the film. The film takes us to 1970s Italy, to an atelier where the Canova sisters make costumes for film and theatre. To the world of the women dressmakers Özpetek observed in Rome in his youth… The dress never leaves the stage; it carries at once the labour of the hands that made it and the soul of the one who wears it. In one scene, the monotonous rhythm of the sewing machines merges with the sound of beads slipping down the stairs. The metallic chime of needle meeting thread works in Diamanti like a symphony playing in the background. Costume here is not merely an object that dresses someone; it is a space of emotion, a silent character whispering in the viewer’s ear.

The dream of Özpetek and the film’s costume designer, Stefano Ciammitti, is not only to create new costumes, but to hold a mirror up to the history of cinema. This is why costumes from Visconti’s The Leopard and Death in Venice, Fellini’s Casanova and Pasolini’s Medea become visible again in this film. Sometimes on mannequins, sometimes passing across the scene like a shadow… Diamanti leaves the impression less of a film than of a living museum. And so Diamanti becomes not only a feature film, but also a tribute to the great masters — Piero Tosi, Piero Gherardi, Danilo Donati.

The solidarity of the women in the atelier is, as throughout Özpetek’s filmography, the invisible backbone of this film too. Each is different: Luisa Ranieri, living by obsessive detail; Jasmine Trinca, fragile in autumnal tones; Kasia Smutniak, radiant in a Pucci kaftan… And moving among them, the metaphor of the pink diamond: fragile yet enduring, rare yet real. The line “We are nothing, yet we are everything” stays in the mind like the film’s poetic summary. In Özpetek’s cinema, flaws, mistakes and small obsessions create a magical whole. When he says “Imperfections turn a simple gesture into magic”, he is in fact revealing the secret of his entire filmography. This is why the fold of a skirt, the sound of buttons or the silence at a dinner table become characters in his films.

Perhaps this is why, watching Diamanti, I am watching not only a film but a reflection of my own memory. In the fold of a fabric, in a face’s unfinished glance, in a light striking the costumes and bouncing back… Özpetek’s cinema always reminds me of this: beauty lies not in the story being told, but in the surface that carries it — hidden in a garment, a silence, a texture. And perhaps the most lasting traces begin precisely there, on that fine, invisible line.