Review: I Am Love
In present-day Milan, director Luca Guadagnino lays his scene. Head of the dining table and of his empire, Grandfather Recchi, nearing death, bellows, “It will take two men to replace me!”
Amongst this sturdy Italian order we find Recchi Jr.’s glamorous and dreamy Russian import, his wife Emma (Tilda Swinton). The pursuit of pleasure mobilising the film, we follow Emma on her idle afternoon adventures.
Emma meets the young chef Antonio, who plays to her palate, and thus begins their illicit affair. But we in the audience can’t taste Antonio’s culinary delights – and exempt from their foreplay, their union seems ideologically based, hardly driven by unadulterated lust.
This chef, young and uncultivated, harvesting his own produce, constitutes a pastoral fantasy on all accounts distinct from the parasitic world of capitalism to which Emma’s husband is attached. We remain happy spectators of this affair, but critically distanced. In a nutshell: I admire the designer shoes but don’t drool over them.
Yet the film still waltzes with emotionally heavy narrative tradition – Emma must bear the weight of her indiscretions, and her sins visit her children. But pushing us back again, the film over-delivers its climactic moments. The sharply choreographed final scene (choreographed with the particular John Adams piece in mind, music the driving force of this grand operatic moment) exits the sphere of cinematic naturalism entirely.
In fact, the best way I can locate the evasive I Am Love is as opera – the classic tragedy, the remoteness of this fabulous stage spectacle, and my feeling that I didn’t really ‘get it’.
Yosh
22/07/10 - 7:24 PM
I agree with you – although I did find that final scene pretty stirring, even though I’m not sure that the film earnt it. Damn cinema for being such a powerful medium!
Emma Jane McNicol
22/07/10 - 7:52 PM
Hmm, Im not saying that Guadagnino doesn’t stir us at all, I guess my point is that Guadagnino creates a special space whereby were lulled into a state of existential absorption (”happy spectators”) but are still emotionally distanced.
The film inspires a more cerebral than cheap emotional enjoyment anyway, we can let all these references sweep over us and even without figuring out who is being referenced where just kind of sit there knowing its ’smart’
Nazli
22/07/10 - 9:10 PM
Danke für die Rezension! Eine sehr passende Analogiebildung, finde ich! und auf jeden Fall das Gefühl von Visconti durch die hochgeladenen Emotionen hat man.
Emma Jane McNicol
22/07/10 - 9:52 PM
hey danke naz, und hast du auch an Belle du jour gedacht?!
Frank Brennan
26/07/10 - 1:29 PM
Thanks for this tight, reflective review Emma. A sign of great things to come.