a SIFF 2010 review
Swinton Soars in Operatically Tragic Love
I am Love, starring the great Tilda Swinton, is a wildly spellbinding melodrama about familial strife and adultery that defies easy categorizations. To call it crazy would be an understatement. To say that craziness is exactly what makes it so wonderfully intoxicating even more so.
Tilda Swinton and Flavio Parenti in I am Love © Magnolia Pictures
The film revolves around the bourgeois Recchi clan living in Milan. Edoardo, Sr. (Gabriele Ferzetti) has just given up control of his hugely successful textile business and has passed it on to both his own son Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) as well as his sentimental yet intelligent grandson Edo (Flavio Parenti). This joint chairmanship comes as a surprise, particularly Edo’s brother Gianluca (Mattia Zaccaro), the pair’s Russian immigrant mother Emma (Tilda Swinton) wondering how this will effect her children.
There is a heck of a lot more going on than this, including Emma’s closely intimate friendship with rising chef Antonio Biscaglia (Edoardo Gabbriellini), the sexual awakening of her college bound daughter Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher) and an unforeseen pregnancy involving Edo’s fiancé Eva Ugolini (Diane Fleri). There is drama revolving around the textile business as well as with Edoardo, Sr.’s widow Allegra (Marisa Berenson) as she tries to micromanage the family’s emotional affairs.
It’s all a big Faustian mess of decadence and debauchery, even choices that seem good on the surface wickedly transforming into one of nascent naked tragedy upon further inspection. The script, based on a story by director Luca Guadagnino (Melissa P) and credited to four writers total, is a Sirkian mess of epic proportions, and trying to keep track of all the tangents as they weave this way and that is both mystifying and hypnotic.
Not that I’m 100-percent comfortable with all that transpires. The movie doesn’t particularly care for character development, Guadagnino painting in such broad operatic strokes he ends up leaving the audience to fend for themselves on that front. Additionally, what transpires is so ungainly and bewildering part of me was left flabbergasted by the final moments for all the wrong reasons. I was perplexed by the raging urgency of these last few scenes, Swinton’s penultimate glances slapping me across the face almost in the same way they were assaulting her children.
Or were they? It’s really hard to tell, the film such an oddly sensuous dreamscape that it becomes increasingly hard to decipher who is happy for whom and who isn’t. On top of that, the obsession on display by Emma as she grows more and more infatuated with Antonio is absolutely chilling, while third act scenes between here and Tancredi have any icy chill that sent cascades of shivers right down my spine.
No matter how one chooses to decipher the narrative the one thing that isn’t in question is the magnificence of much of the acting. Swinton is as sensational as ever, and even if I often felt her choices were made in narcissistic selfishness that didn’t mean I didn’t believe the character wouldn’t have made them. Parenti is every bit as good as she is, however, the sexual ambiguity he brings to Edo adding just the right touch of uncertainty to Emma and Antonio’s relationship making a major third act twist all the more tragic.
The film is also a technical triumph, the production design, costumes, editing, cinematography and especially John Adams’ magnificent score adding just the right operatic flair to the proceedings. Guadagnino handles all these different aspects skillfully, ratcheting up the tension at the same rate his characters dig themselves an even deeper hole.
I still feel a bit at arm’s length from I am Love, but even with that said more than one month later after seeing it this is one motion picture I simply cannot get out of my head. From the beauteous windswept snowy Milan vistas of the opening scenes all the way to the darkened subterranean sexual imbroglio of the post-credit coda, this is a movie I refuse to let go of. It is a one of a kind effort deserving of attention, and even if the murky nature of its emotional catacombs will not be for every taste as far as I’m concerned this is one meal I could happily devour on a far more frequent basis.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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