An infernal actress: Meryl Streep is the best (but not the only) reason to watch the poisonous The Devil Wars Prada

Rating: Null/10 (7 October 2006)

In the ultra-rarefied environment of the big-world and prêt-à-porter for the rich, there is a consensus that few people rule more than the London native Anna Wintour, publisher of the American magazine Vogue. With an wave of the head or a plait of the lips she makes and unmakes entire careers, imposes or bury collections and infuses happiness or sadness in the soul of a co-worker. It consists that Anna doesn't just chooses the place that she herself will occupy in the auditorium of the great parades; it is said that she chooses where her disaffections will sit, so they won't see or be seen by her. To incarnate such formidable personality is not a task for anyone. Actually, David Frankle, the director of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) found the only person capable of doing it - Meryl Streep walks by the corridors of the fictitious Runway magazine like Catherine the Great on way to her crown ceremony and fusillades subordinates with the unpleasantness of a hard line soviet director. Meryl is a delight: an actress with no rival that puts everything she knows to service a character which no one has guts to rival against.
The film is an adaptation of the homonym best-seller, written with a lot of humor and clear spirit of rematch by an Anna Wintour ex-assistant, Lauren Weisberger. The book, tells of how a recently graduated journalist, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), change her ideals for a job as a punching bag for the publisher of Runaway - and also for a closet worthy to contemplate at least the lighter modalities of faustian pacts. Every morning, her boss, baptized in the original version as Miranda Priestly, enters the office and pours the purse and coat over the head of the assistant, because is too prepotent to deliver it properly on the hands of the girl. For months, calls Andy for the name of her other assistant, Emily, because judges that she hasn't conquered yet the right for a separate identity. And, day after day, tortures all around her with censorship delivered in a tone of voice almost unheardable. Lauren swears that Miranda is not a mirror of her ex-boss, but is her invention. Not that anybody believes on it. Miranda, is true, has a silhouette of a woman, and not an X-ray (like the writer Tom Wolfe described the extremely thin new yorkers girls of the superior stratus), and her hair is white-silver, instead of the dark hair of Anna. But the proof that the fashion world knows that Miranda is Anna is on the several "griffes" that didn't want to collaborate with the dressing of the film, fearful from reprisals from the Vogue.
Meryl and the venom of the plot are not the only right hits of The Devil Wears Prada. In general, movies about the world of fashion portrays their integrant as idiotic people and triflers, that only thinks in superfluous things when there are so much serious things going on on the planet - is the case, for example, of Prêt-à=Poter of Robert Altman. This condescension is absent in this film: David Frinkel knows that people like Anna Wintour, John Galliano or Karl Lagerfield, despite the exotic visual pose, are executives that makes decisions with global ramifications and have corporate responsibilities in the order of billions of dollars. People, at last, that in each clothes, footwear or accessory that wear have to signalize your specific form of power and extension of your net of influences. To see this environment portrayed in this form is refreshing. And the clothes, in fact, are to kill for.