Culture - 9/2/24
EL AFFAIRE MIU MIU, directed by Laura Citarella, Argentine film director and producer, is the 28th commission from Miu Miu Women’s Tales. The acclaimed short-film series invites today’s most profound and original female directors to investigate vanity and femininity in the 21st century.
A fashion campaign in Latin America takes an Italian model to the Argentine Pampas. The clothing brand: Miu Miu. The city: Trenque Lauquen. The Italian crew members stroll through the city as if they were a queen’s retinue paying a visit to a foreign land. The model, beautiful and exotic, greets the people who stop on the street to admire her. A few days later, the detectives of the town—all women— begin an investigation into a disappearance: the model has gone missing after the shoot. The last images of her are taken from security camera footage, showing a woman darting strangely through the streets of Trenque Lauquen. The investigators follow the clues within the Miu Miu clothes and the Argentine landscape to try and trace the model’s path.
In El Affaire Miu Miu, Citarella continues to explore her ongoing interest in “female Sherlock Holmes” figures who try and solve the puzzle of “women that, for different reasons, run away.”
“I had to learn how to film outfits,” she admits, regarding the role the Miu Miu clothes play in the film. “It was necessary to find a connection between fashion and storytelling, by melting the fantastic pampa’s landscape and the world of Miu Miu, where the clothes are part of the fiction as main character.” And while the Director’s natural format is long-form storytelling, especially when detectives need time to unravel a crime, she says that “the important thing is that stories always manifest the time they need to be told.”
This latest instalment of Miu Miu Women’s Tales is a wry, female-driven Hitchcockian detective story. In El Affaire Miu Miu, we see Italian style meet Argentine supernaturalism. Laura Citarella’s obsession with women who are “keener for adventures than anything else” collides with the metanarrative of the women who become the faces of Miu Miu. Along the way, in the countryside, the film’s investigators find pieces of the dress she was wearing. Meanwhile, we spectators observe the model making her pilgrimage across the pampas and gradually merging into the natural scenery. As if she were the very embodiment of the landscape itself. A fusion of a character, a dress, and a place.
The short is afterwards available on Miu Miu digital channels, and on MUBI globally from September 27.
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