“Cruella”, the trailer for the film (which winks at “The Devil wears Prada”)

Halfway, between The devil wears Prada and any superhero movie. The cruel, of which Disney released a first, long trailer on Wednesday afternoon, is not a remake, of the kind that the Studios have accustomed their audience to. Rather, it looks like an attempt to reread a classic in the light of present awareness and fashions.

In the short video, anticipation of how much Disney will release, in theaters and online, on May 28th next, what you see is new. Surprising at times.

Cruella De Mon, the very bad girl of Charge of the 101, obsessed with the spotted fur of Dalmatians, does not have the face of Glenn Close. He is young. Estella, she calls herself on the streets of London, at the dawn of the seventies and the punk rock revolution. The hair is red, the style anonymous. Yet, Estella, the face of Emma Stone, is one of the most brilliant creators that the English capital has ever known. Such is his skill in making à la page clothes that he attracted Baroness von Hellman, a capricious noble with the features of Emma Thompson.

Von Hellman, in the trailer for Disney’s live-action prequel to Charge that was, it has as much elegance as it has nastiness. And, almost, looking at her, it seems to be in front of Miranda Priestly. Estella, in her anonymous role, collects, with the same humility that Andrea Sachs would have shown. At night, however, when Andrea Sachs, years later, would have allowed herself a few hours of sweaty rest, she changes. Cruella becomes the germ of the De Mon that would have turned the life of poor Anita upside down.

The cruel, live-action Disney, does not tell, therefore, the Charge of the 101 as done by Glenn Close. It tells of the slow metamorphosis that pushed Estella to embrace her own evil side, with the complicity (and super-homistic pomp) of Gaspare and Orazio.