Io sono l’amore

Luca Guadagnino (2009)

It has colossal visual allure, momentum and high quality acting.  I Am Love is extremely enjoyable if you don’t take it too seriously.  It’s liable to be taken too seriously, though, because of:  (a) Tilda Swinton’s physical authority in the lead role, (b) the richly beautiful images of naked bodies and landscape (and, at one point, naked bodies in landscape), and (c) the combination of those images with the high culture of the manmade world that we see (snow collecting on classical statuary, etc).   Written by Luca Guadagnino and Barbara Alberti, this story is a very familiar one.  An upper-class woman, acting out both a public and a private role in a chilly marriage, has an ardent love affair which threatens the fabric of the carefully constructed world to which she belongs but doesn’t belong.  The only reason this may not seem like an old story is the inclusion of elements that wouldn’t have formed part of an equivalent romantic melodrama of the 1940s or 1950s:  the heroine’s love for a man not just younger but decades younger than she is; her lesbian daughter; the sexual explicitness of the proceedings.

The colour scheme, especially of Swinton’s outfits, is irresistible and her expert performance is co-ordinated with them.  At the start, as she directs a large domestic staff in preparations for a big family dinner, she suggests a woman in charge but with something in reserve.  Her puce-coloured dress completes the impression of a contained potential for passion.  As that passion rises to the surface, she starts wearing scarlet and orange; when she’s ensnared and in two minds, a light blue top and tangerine jeans.  The increasingly brilliant colours of the natural world in which the affair explodes (the DoP is Yorick Le Saux) are also part of the visual scheme and the movement of the seasons is synchronised with it.   The story begins in midwinter (‘covering/Earth in forgetful snow’).  A few months later, the temperature is high enough for making love outdoors.

The relationships within the Recchi family, a Milanese textile dynasty, are established no less obviously in the long opening dinner sequence (although it takes quite some time to work out who’s who).   This introduction is made absorbing by the camera’s movement across the doorways and opulent surfaces and artefacts of the house, which somehow reflects Emma (Swinton)’s situation and spirit.  The place seems to embody coldness with latent possibilities. We realise that Emma’s dully handsome husband, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), is a competent businessman but will never-be-the-man-his-father-was.  The father, Edoardo (Gabriele Ferzetti), is as scared of death as he’s egotistical (the two things maybe go together anyway).  His elder grandson (Flavio Parenti) shares his name and Edoardo Sr sees him as a kindred spirit although this cautiously smiling, edgy young man doesn’t come across as a chip off the old block.  The elderly Edoardo decides to take the opportunity of his birthday dinner to announce that he’s bequeathing the company jointly to his son and his grandson.

Earlier that day, Edoardo Jr has taken part in a race which, to his grandfather’s consternation, he’s lost to a young man who is a lowly chef.  (It was never clear to me what kind of race this was.)  Later that evening, the chef, Antonio Biscaglia (Edoardo Gabbriellini), arrives at the house with a consolation cake for his vanquished rival – an event that seems both improbable and bound to have repercussions:  this is when Emma first sees Antonio.  Luca Guadagnino has a knack of giving moments and details a symbolic weight that seems to validate them even when they’re implausible on a realistic level.  At one point, Emma rushes distractedly into a shop and picks up a book about Russian art.  She leaves the shop with the book and apparently without paying for it, a misdemeanour that I could never get out of my law-abiding mind.  The book becomes the expression of a more dramatic guilty secret, as well as of Emma’s rediscovering her own nature

The script is sketchy in terms of explaining the characters’ reactions to key developments in the story.  What, for example, does Tancredi think of his daughter’s lesbianism?  Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher) is the most salient part of a somewhat opaque homosexual strand running through I Am Love.  (The young Edoardo and Antonio go into partnership to open a restaurant; Edoardo seems to be physically attracted to Antonio, although the feeling is not evidently mutual.  When Emma and Tancredi are watching a film on television, it’s Philadelphia.)  You overlook the sketchiness, though, thanks to scenes like the one in which Emma, visiting Antonio’s restaurant with Tancredi’s mother (Marisa Berenson), experiences the aphrodisiac properties of the chef’s food and thereby realises what she’s starting to feel about the young man himself.  Tilda Swinton goes into an eroticised trance eating prawns.  This is a good example of the gorgeously exaggerated style of I Am Love – it’s silly and intensely entertaining.

Guadagnino has so much flair that he succeeds in concealing clichés – as, for example, when Emma has a flashback to key moments in the story.  You really do experience this as things colliding and being pieced together in her mind.   The John Adams music, which the composer agreed to Guadagnino’s using, is deployed so wittily that it copes even with having to accompany the al fresco sex scene between Emma and Antonio, intercut with shots of bees feasting on flowers, flowers blooming, sounds of the earth pulsing with life – all paving the way for orgasm.  A sequence in which Emma sees Antonio by chance and feels compelled to follow him has an elating urgency.  (The editing is by Walter Fasano.)  Guadagnino is skilful too in disorienting you by occasional, unexpected leaps forward in the narrative.  There are a few weak spots:  the writing and visualisation of a business deal interlude in London (which looks like a reproduction of Milan with red buses) is especially lame.  After Edoardo Jr’s shocking death, the subversive part of Emma’s grief – that she may not be able to continue her affair with Antonio – is muted by a conventional funeral scene.  For the most part, though, the direction is delightfully confident and assured.  The closing image of Emma and Antonio together – in a kind of chrysalis cave – is intriguing.

The heroine was brought by her then young husband to Italy from Russia and Emma is the name he gave her (though Tancredi doesn’t strike you as a reader of Flaubert).  She says that she was known within her Russian family as Kitiesh but claims she can’t remember her real name.  The idea seems to be that she no longer has a name – which being interpreted is that the constraining world she’s married into has deprived her of an identity.  She attains a new identity through her passion for Antonio – hence the film’s title.   Perhaps Elisabetta is love too, defined by the sexual choice she’s made:  when Emma finally walks out of her marriage to elope with Antonio, her daughter, alone among the family, seems to understand and accept what her mother is doing.  The whole cast is good – three of the women especially so:  Maria Paiato as Emma’s maid, Ida; Marisa Berenson, a spectacularly glamorous granny (I assumed at the start she was Emma’s sister-in-law rather than mother-in-law); and Tilda Swinton herself.  Although I thought she was overrated in Michael Clayton, I’ve really liked Swinton in her smaller roles since, in Burn After Reading and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (she was by far the best thing in the latter).  Here she seems to have changed suddenly from being a character actress into an unarguable star.   Her looks make her convincingly Russian too – even if it’s one of Guadagnino’s sillier ideas to have her wear a peasant headscarf when she’s cooking for Antonio a dish that her mother used to make back in the USSR.

11 April 2010