I Am Love (Io sono l’amore)

Directed by Luca Guadagnino
(Italy, 2009)

Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore (I Am Love) achieves first-rate cinematography. From opening snapshots of Milan in falling snow to photography of exquisite palace interiors, the movie sustains compelling visual wonder. Surfaces are examined from every angle—from above or straight on, from behind a door, or through a window. The conglomerate of pictures surpasses the pages of Architectural Digest, but share that milieu: the design, furnishings, and atmospheres of people with the richest artistic taste and pockets to express it. This capturing of design and architecture through the medium of stunningly rendered photography is the film’s outstanding attribute.

Surfaces dominate for the first half of the film, the surfaces of a high-society European family. Elegant dinners and parties are the pivotal center of family life, though the patriarchs go to work running their globally significant textile company. Servants prepare food and food comes to the candlelit banquet table via black-suited waiters wearing white gloves. Women are ornaments. “Surroundings,” the delicate, elevated effects of class are what matters.

In the second half of the movie the mistress of this world, Emma (a Russian, played by Tilda Swinton) moves to the fore as the central character, along with her adored son Eduardo (Flavio Parenti). Their lives intertwine with tragic consequences when Emma breaks free from the chains of her high society role to become lovers with Eduardo’s friend who has attracted her through the high art of his cooking. That is the movie’s story, with a few other family threads weaving through it, such as the daughter Bette’s coming out as a lesbian, spurring her mother’s own break from rigid expectations. Thus from the outward surfaces of the Recchi family’s lives we move into the more interior ones—the passions, the search for love. And here the movie is less successful. The surfaces of these peoples’ lives leaves their interiors shallow, or we know so little about them from their surfaces in the first half that we don’t particularly care about their interiors in the second half, though the superb performance by Tilda Swinton elicits vague compassion for her character, who undergoes a mid-life, and also social-class, crisis. The five-minute dreamy, abstract sex scene with Emma and her young lover fails visually and becomes a contrived distraction. Eduardo’s accidental death stretches the prevailing mood of the movie and isn’t necessary for Emma’s transformation—that has happened already. Thus the last scenes patch together with little credence in a weak ending. We care about Emma, but that’s all. We understand her loss of a son but we hardly feel anything for the young man lost because only Emma has substance as a character in the movie. All else is surfaces—the surfaces of rich lives in and out. Does the director intend us to admire this world or see it as surfaces? Or, is the murky ambiguity intended, and if so, it waters down the impact of the movie. An outlook to ponder is missing; what remains is banal. Five stars for photography, no stars for story.

For screening times visit the San Francisco International Film Festival http://fest10.sffs.org

© 2010 Gail Spilsbury, all rights reserved

Photo: www.sffs.org