Needles and the damage done: "Diamonds"

Completing this week's line-up of festival faves: the Turkish-born, Italy-based Ferzan Özpetek, whose early Noughties melodramas positioned him as a back-up Almodóvar. (To the extent that he would later bill himself, with no small measure of grandiosity, as simply Özpetek.) Much as the beloved Pedro has started to get self-referential with age, so too, apparently, has Özpetek: his latest Diamonds, its maker's biggest domestic hit, opens with footage of the filmmaker gathering his favourite actresses together for a meal at which he announces he has a new project for them all to star in. One of the party, observing the almost exclusively distaff line-up, wonders whether the project might be titled Vaginodrome, a suggestion her director overrules as inappropriate. Yet Diamonds does unfold within a milieu that might indeed merit such a description: a demanding costumier's female-staffed workshop in 1970s Rome, sprung into frantic life to provide the clothes for a (female) Oscar-winning director - for which cinephiles are bound to read Lina Wertmüller - as she gears up on her next production. (Özpetek, we should note, has never even been nominated for an Oscar, but a fellow can dream.) By day, the assembled minions measure, cut, ruche and stitch, pausing in between to bicker and gossip; after hours, they endure a variety of issues, from ingrate children to abusive spouses. They're the real diamonds, you see.

As a rugged, red-blooded heterosexual male keeping one eye on this year's tense Championship run-in, your correspondent is almost certainly not the target audience in this instance, but even he could broadly see the appeal: for two-and-a-quarter hours, Özpetek outlines a lavishly furnished safe space into which viewers might retreat for a few laughs, tears, sobs and swoons. (An alternative title: Glamma Mia!) Although he gets distracted when, for some reason, his women have to measure up a phalanx of shirtless young actors in tighty-whities, this is clearly a director who adores actresses, granting even the lowliest of clothiers a close-up, a moment or a signature flourish; Özpetek even ends the film with a list of those grande dames he still wants to work with, which is either touching or desperate. Only if you switch on your critical faculties do you notice there's no variation of tone, no heightening of stakes, a liability in a 135-minute feature: even when Diamonds turns its hand to something more dramatic - as in the domestic abuse subplot - it soon snaps back so as to give the other gals something light to do. Everything is sunny, fabulous, bella; everyone is handsome, sassy, well-dressed; the year's most insistently applied musical theme, meanwhile, plods and pulls its strings. There are, of course, worse things for a semi-prominent filmmaker to do with the money afforded him; and there are worse ways for us to spend an afternoon than being cosseted. (It's the movie equivalent of a spa day or long lunch on someone else's dime: an indulgence.) Yet there's a reason Almodóvar is routinely hailed as a great of world cinema and Özpetek isn't; I came away from Diamonds with a newfound respect for the way Jocelyn Moorhouse's slightly under-appreciated The Dressmaker, from a decade or so ago, troubled to mix up its camp.

Diamonds opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.