Oscar winner Mark Rylance stars in a film that squeezes film noir tics with purpose
‘The Mafia Tailor’ begins elegantly, with a sequence of shots detailing the main character’s workshop, while an off-screen voice – a common tool in the film – details some details of his profession, the master’s tricks , under whose gaze the clothes we wear become information and say a lot about who wears them, how everyone is, shy, cheeky or carefree. English actor and playwright Mark Rylance plays the king of the show, the weight of the action falls on his shoulders, sometimes theatrically. Once again he shows his worth and integrity in front of the camera, as in the recent ‘Don’t Look Up’ or ‘The Bridge of Spies’, for which he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Newcomer Graham Moore, cultivated in the field of television, directs a story set in Chicago in the mid-1950s. The skilled seamstress ends up in this American city, leaving the city of London behind, where he made costumes for the media. on Mayfair’s popular Savile Row. A personal tragedy leads him to cross the great ocean to start over in a small tailor shop with mostly underworld people as customers. The local mobsters are the only ones who can afford the couturier’s designs, who don’t hesitate to mutter that “they are elegant men, but they are not gentlemen.”
Presented at the Berlin festival, ‘The Mafia Tailor’ tells how the protagonist, exceptional Rylance, expressive and restrained when playing, with sharp British slime, becomes irreparably entangled in the strand of the mafia’s shenanigans, like an insect in a spider’s web . Appropriately photographed, with a style as vintage as it is current, the shop is the scene of a crescendo drama that erupts when the protagonist is forced to sew a bleeding wound instead of a cloth in the back of his well-manicured workshop.
The tailor shop becomes the meeting place for criminals, who take advantage of the seamstress’s gentle nature. Meticulous in his craft, generous and accommodating, the relationship with his assistant, Zoey Deutch, featured in ‘How to Escape Buffalo’ is one of the strengths of a plot that expresses some film noir tics with precision. Remarkable is the music of Alexandre Desplat, co-worker on the soundtrack of films such as ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ or ‘The Shape of Water’. The composer’s work glorifies some intelligently shot sequences, although the climax is not in the first acts. A recommendable gangster film, with a skilled cast crowned by young talents Dylan O’Brien (“Love and Monsters”) and Johnny Flynn (“Emma”).
Source: La Verdad
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