I AM LOVE (IO SONO L’AMORE)
In discussing her latest film with director, Luca Guadagnino, Tilda Swinton describes the main character she plays, Emma Recchi, as related to iconic female literary and film predecessors including Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. She inserts the actress Alida Valli in between these two fictional characters, for her performance as Livia in Senso, the great operatic melodrama directed by Luchino Visconti, an adaptation of a novella by Camillo Boito.
Like those works, the narrative of I Am Love is one of great passion and decidedly from the woman’s point of view. As literature the first two novels are masterpieces of this form, but there are no great films of either. Swinton refers to Senso because it is the closest natural predecessor, a definitive visualization of love caught between liberation and tragedy. After one of the most stunningly beautiful openings of a film in recent memory, the camera gliding through the soft blue, snow covered night streets of Milan we land just outside a magnificent mansion. As we enter the vast rooms with their 15 foot ceilings, we finally see Emma, the perfectly manicured woman of wealth, tightly bound, sealed from head to toe in design and aesthetic.
Swinton is a magnificent and captivating presence on screen. She once said, when asked about her acting technique that it amounted to her being part of the set design. She does a bit more than that, but her physical presence is so uniquely sculptural that her statement is true. Yet she is a shape shifter, never exactly the same piece of of design. In this instance, as the cosseted wife she is perhaps more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her. Every dress or outfit, tailored perfectly by Jill Sander, complementing her natural elegance in a quiet, understated way. She even carries the now overexposed Birkin bag, the ultimate accessory of a certain kind of moneyed and mature taste, so casually that one could almost miss it.
In this way, Guadagnino has pulled together the mechanisms of both Visconti and Douglas Sirk, with a splash of the Antonioni. It is no accident that Gabrielle Ferzetti who worked with Antonioni in films like L’Avventura, is the old patriarch, Edoardo Recchi, Sr. But this film is no retread, there is no feeling that it is trying, trying to recreate a form or as in Todd Haynes’ near miss Far From Heaven. Yet without that effort, Guadagnino comes as close as anyone yet to updating the gloriously rich “women’s picture,” a genre that, despite it’s ubiquitousness (almost everything coming out of Hollywood is based on the melodramatic forumula of good versus evil + emotion) is roundly dismissed as low brow, debased, reduced to the Lifetime Movie Network.
But Italy has never been embarrassed about its’ excess. Emma is the rich and repressed, middle aged woman who finds herself swept up in a passionate affair. I won’t spoil it by telling you how it ends, but of course, respecting genre conventions there is a tragedy, a stunning upset. This is a project that took seven years to complete and it is aesthetically perfect, from the art design to John Adams’ brilliantly intense score. It’s an Italian film in the great operatic tradition from Visconti, to Zeffrelli, to Rosi, that demonstrates exactly how to channel the explosive passion of love into visual art.
I Am Love is now playing theaters.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino; written by Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo, Walter Fasano and Luca Guadagnino, based on a story by Luca Guadagnino; produced by Luca Guadagnino, Tilda Swinton, Alessandro Usai, Francesco Melzi D’Eril, Marco Morabito, Massimilliano Violante; cinematography by Yorick Le Saux; edited by Walter Fasano; production design by Francesca Di Mottola; and music by John Adams. Released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 120 minutes
With: Tilda Swinton (Emma Recchi); Flavio Parenti (Edoardo Recchi, Jr.); Edoardo Gabbriellini (Antonio Biscaglia); Alba Rohrwacher (Elisabetta Rechhi); Pippo Delbono (Tancredi Recchi); Maria Paiato (Ida Marangon); Diane Fleri (Eva Ungolini); Waris Ahluwalia (Mr. Kubelkian); Gabriele Ferzetti (Edoardo Recchi, Sr.) and Marisa Berenson (Allegra Recchi.)
