Review: There’s Blood, Sweat, and Tears in the Fabric in Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s Lacrima

“When you look at it, you see a beautiful veil,” says one of the lacemakers of Alençon. “But we see blood and sweat and tears.”

The painstaking labor that goes into the making of one wedding dress ties together three communities of artists in Lacrima, the kaleidoscopically multilingual tapestry of a drama from French playwright-director Caroline Guiela Nguyen.

It’s early 2025 and the Princess of England has a vision for the dress she’ll wear at her summer royal wedding. It’ll be completely embroidered, “from head to toe,” and that will require over 200,000 pearls to be affixed to the silk by hand by an expert in Mumbai. She’ll wear an inherited veil, but it will need to be repaired in that same small town in Normandy where it was first made. And a Parisian atelier will carry out the designer’s wishes, putting it all together in a bustling studio of technicians and pattern makers, sworn to secrecy by an NDA that will last exactly 100 years.

Lacrima captures the masochistic meticulousness in each of these workshops. Projections often show us artisans sketching, lacing, and embroidering in split-screen: with a four and a half hour time difference between France and Mumbai, not to mention endless days, someone’s always working on the dress. The strict ethics rules from Buckingham Palace to avoid an exploitation scandal (the laborers must not exceed certain weekly maximum hours, for example) put the Mumbai workshop under particular pressure: there’s only one embroiderer, Abdul Gani (Charles Vinoth Irudhayaraj), expert enough for the assignment, and he can’t possibly get it done on such a crushing deadline.

That’s tension enough, but Nguyen discolors her design with a pair of melodramatic subplots. In Paris, the premiere atelier Marion (Maud Le Grevellec) seeks refuge from her unsafe marriage to Julien (Dan Artus) who also works for her studio. When Julien confronts her, gone is the play’s verisimilitude—the rhythm of sewing machines is replaced by a thumping bass, high-octane soundscape. So much for subtle storytelling.

Despite fine acting in the Alençon scenes, the subplot there really takes the play off the rails. Thérèse (Liliane Lipau, completely charming as an elderly lacemaker) has a granddaughter in Australia who seems to be showing symptoms of a rare genetic condition that could kill her. Before she undergoes an extreme medical procedure, she needs to know whether Thérèse’s sister Rose may have died from the same mysterious symptoms. Thérèse, though, won’t talk about Rose, even to save her granddaughter.

This plotline, which has no impact on the princess’ veil whatsoever, mainly serves to extend Lacrima’s running time to an unnecessary two hours and 55 minutes (broken up by a mere a three-minute pause). Fortunately, Nguyen movingly integrates the personal drama in Mumbai into the central storyline. Abdul is going blind after decades of straining his vision over countless pearls, and, in a devastating eye test, conducted in and out of his native Tamil so that he can’t understand what’s happening, he’s disqualified from finishing this magnus opus of embroidery. It’s in these scenes that Nguyen does her deftest work to suggest the geopolitical contradictions that go into international high fashion: “You want ethics from us,” complains the Mumbai workshop’s artistic director (Vasanth Selvam), “but you don’t want to spend even a single penny.”

Much of the dialogue is in French and Tamil (with English supertitles), but the camera projections center the filmic storytelling. There’s unsurprisingly breathtaking work on the haute couture pieces from Benjamin Moreau, and Nguyen excels at the staging’s “fabric-ography” as silks unfurl. And at Lacrima’s up-close, high-tension best, Marion perilously applies steam to the embroidered fabric in order to unwrinkle it in a staggeringly stressful sequence.

Putting aside Lacrima’s strained fictions, the play is undeniably most compelling when it invites audiences to clue into the tortured precision of each stitch and pearl and pencil line. Whenever Nguyen trusts in the enchantment of watching skilled artists carry out their craft, it’s hard to look away from the drama of dressmaking itself.