-STEPHEN HOLDEN

Short, majestically coiffed, with hooded eyes, an orange-tinted tan and the peevish impatience of an absolute monarch: that is Valentino Garavani, the Italian couturier known simply as Valentino, as he appears in Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary portrait, Valentino: The Last Emperor. Watching the movie is a little like gorging on chocolate and champagne until that queasy moment arrives when you realise you’ve consumed far too much.

Valentino, 77, has created hundreds of beautiful gowns for the most glamorous women (most famously, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) since the 1960s. Born to do only this, he insists, he never had much aptitude for the business aspect of fashion or for anything else. As you observe him in his workshop supervising helpers who hand-stitch every sequin on every dress (there’s not a sewing machine in sight), you begin to appreciate his single-minded perfectionism in the service of a fantasy.

From early adolescence, when he fell in love with 1930s and ’40s American movies, he remembers, he was enthralled with Hollywood’s screen goddesses. A clip of stars descending a staircase in the 1941 movie Ziegfeld Girl suggests the template for all that followed.

Asked to answer Freud’s famous question, “What do women want?,” he declares in oracular tones, “They want to be beautiful.” As evidenced by the fantastic gowns he has created, he has fulfilled those wishes to the extent that clothing can confer beauty where there was none. Valentino’s opulent, royal ideal of feminine raiment has always been largely untouched by trends.

This here-and-now portrait offers only the sketchiest biography. There is little personal background. We drop in on a couple of his many lavish palaces, visit his yacht and watch him and his business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, as they board a private jet with six pugs.

The film focuses on his affectionate but testy relationship with Giammetti, whom he met at a cafe on the Via Veneto in Rome in 1960 (they disagree on exactly which cafe), became lovers, then business partners. According to Giammetti, if you added up the days they have spent apart since meeting, it amounts to only two months. Giammetti has been the business mastermind behind Valentino’s fashion empire, valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The last half of the movie is an elegy for the end of an era of haute couture as personified by Valentino and a handful of others, including Karl Lagerfeld. Valentino is shown strolling hand in hand with Lagerfeld at Valentino’s July 2007 farewell bash in Rome, two months after which he officially retired. Swallowed up by big business, the great fashion houses of Europe are now mass-market franchises with designer names attached to all manner of clothing and accessories.

We watch the preparation and execution of one of Valentino’s final couture shows, based on a desert theme, in which impossibly thin, elegant models dressed in white slink among fake dunes built on what could pass as the set of a ’40s movie musical.

Finally, there is the climactic three-day blowout commemorating Valentino’s 45th anniversary in fashion. It included a retrospective of his work at the Ara Pacis Museum, a celebrity-packed black-tie ball at the Villa Borghese and a Cirque du Soleil-like spectacle at the Temple of Venus overlooking the Colosseum, illuminated in his signature red, with high-wire ballerinas flying to and fro. Celebration is too mild a word for this opulent party: the retirement staged as a coronation. (NYT)