In “I Am Love” (Io Sono L’amore), Tilda Swinton plays Emma, the matriarch of a rich bourgeois Italian family. Wooed from her native Russia by Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), the heir of a Milanese textile fortune, she becomes his perfect wife and ideal mother to their children. She’s trim, stylish, controlled, yet warm; she keeps everyone around her on their mark, she plans family gatherings with precision, she councils wisely. Still, despite outward appearances there’s something unsettled in her.
Although she fully embraces the Italian culture (she speaks the language impeccably, she knows her place in male/female protocol), she remains an outsider and seems unfulfilled. This yearning enables her to understand and accept her daughter, Betta’s (Alba Rohrwacher) newly discovered gay sexuality. It also allows for her own lusty awakening as she falls for her son, Eduaordo’s (Flavio Parenti) best friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini).
Under Antonio’s spell, Emma is taken down and stripped raw. He cuts her hair; arouses the peasant in her. She experiences pleasure in a new and potent way. The film swells and crescendos melodramatically and careens toward Edoardo’s shocked discovery of his mother’s affair after which tragedy strikes. John Adams’ bold orchestral score accompanies the trajectory of love and tragedy with operatic intensity, driving the pace of the action of the film to a feverish pitch. The music almost becomes as strong a voice as any other character.
Writer-director Luca Guadagnino subtly infuses the film with an undercurrent of
religiosity. He gives us ceremonial and ritualistic depictions of opulent meals as if they were modern day high masses and then strikes us with the unspoken penitential sentence of death in answer to Emma’s adultery. Despite the changes of mores in modern Italian culture, these powerfully ingrained themes still emerge as very much a part of their story telling.
Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s palate aptly takes us from the gray chilled Milan to the bright hot Sanremo in parallel to Emma’s transformation from cool isolation into fiery passion.
There’s a lot to admire in this film--no one could better inhabit Emma’s journey that Swinton, but it somehow unravels at the end with Tancredi’s abrupt and brutal excommunication of her. It’s not the utter tragedy of the situation that unsatisfies, it’s the manner in which it’s delivered. The story becomes too truncated. We’ve sat patiently through a very slow build up and then we’re unceremoniously dropped on our heads without so much as an explanation. Just as Emma would never send her guests away without dessert, we, as, viewers, shouldn’t be sent away without a proper explanation.
"I Am Love" is directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Luca Guadagnino (story), Luca Guadagnino (screenplay) & Barbara Alberti (screenplay) &
Ivan Cotroneo (screenplay) & Walter Fasano (screenplay)
I’ll give it a 7. The orange isn’t quite ripe, it’s still a bit tart.
