I Am Love
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Pippo Delbono, Alba Rohrwacher Director: Luca Guadagnino Category: III (Italian and Russian)
I Am Love's crucial scenes are driven by sensual pleasures - mainly of the culinary and carnal kinds - but there's another visual leitmotif which is probably as telling about the film. It's the closing entryways: there are many instances in which the camera declines to follow Emma (Tilda Swinton, below), a rich industrialist's wife, as she leaves a room - at home, in a restaurant, in a hospital - and shuts the door behind her.
These punctuated glances hint at how Emma's story will unfold. While graced at times with brazen colours and riveting human drama, Luca Guadagnino's film is masterfully controlled, an immaculate piece of art which just happens to depict the hurricane-like changes sweeping through the life of an emotionally glaciated woman.
Guadagnino's aesthetics are consolidated in the film's first sequence. Darting between the dauntingly grey landscapes of a wintry Milan and the scorchingly colourful interiors of a grand mansion in the city - images overlaid with a jarring mix of 1960s-style title credits and a chugging John Adams score - I Am Love begins with a contrast which speaks of the schisms confronting Emma. A Russian-born woman who has married into the moneyed Recchi clan, she seems reconciled to the strict discipline of Italian upper-class life as she oversees preparations for a family dinner.
As the house's hallowed halls begin to fill up with people and their stilted talk about bourgeois pastimes and old-school family honour, Emma's world begins to crack. Schisms emerge within the ranks as patriarch Edoardo Snr (Gabriele Ferzetti) proclaims both Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) and Edoardo (Flavio Parenti) - Emma's husband and eldest son respectively - the heirs to his business empire, while he expresses disdain towards his art-student granddaughter Betta (Alba Rohrwacher) as she professes her new-found love for photography, a medium Edoardo Snr regards as inferior to painting.
Such tensions push Emma to break out from the clan's conservative constraints as her dormant desires are awakened, first by her realisation of Betta's emergence into adulthood - through her same-sex relationship in London with a fellow student - and, finally, a meeting with Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a chef who's planning to open a restaurant with Edoardo. In one of the film's most memorable sequences, Emma's ice-queen veneer collapses, giving way to a new obsession with love and life that will intensify as her desires lead to joy, calamity and escape.
As in almost everything she does, Swinton's nuanced performance is at the heart of the film's success, but Guadagnino is her equal here, lavishing his film with intoxicating imagery and an engaging narrative which takes aim at the darker undercurrents beneath the facades of his Italian aristocrats. As the family struggles with changes - whether the newer cultural and social structures as shown through Betta's romance, or the onslaught of the economic system generated by late capitalism - Emma's problems are the lit fuse to the tinderbox, as she becomes the explosive embodiment of love (and individualism) in a strangely loveless world.
I Am Love opens today
