REVIEW: Tilda Swinton Dazzles in Virtuosic I Am Love

Guadagnino's direction throughout the lunch scene -- extreme close-ups of the exquisitely plated food mixed with shots from a mobile camera that never stops searching the faces of Emma and her companions -- builds to suggest a mild hysteria, then a sublime falling away. From this point on the camera, which has been closing in on Emma from that first bedroom shot, becomes completely simpatico with her every mood and movement, resulting in an aesthetic that combines virtuoso camerawork and impressionistic futzing. Upon learning that her daughter is living openly at school as a lesbian, something unhinges in Emma -- a tenderness and an acceptance at odds with toeing the family's appearance-conscious line -- and she begins to explore her own desires.

It happens that Antonio lives in Sanremo -- Tom Ripley country; the city of secret identities -- and to Sanremo Emma is drawn, donning a Vertigo bun and carried blindly along -- as every stride, bite, and kiss in this film is -- by the Hitchcockian plunder of John Adams's score. From clanking, modernist piano runs to lathery, shuddering strings, Adams's arrangements seem to goad on Guadagnino's audacious, at times completely, shamelessly absurd direction. The two form an arty pas de deux in the scene that follows Antonio's methodical disrobing of Emma (they run into each other on the street, which could totally happen); if anything they give the new lovers -- who seem to be trying to swallow each other in the grass -- a run for their money.

Through Antonio, who generally lets his food and his hot body do the talking, we learn of Emma's Russian background -- the food she ate, the family she gave up, and the name she used to have, Emma being the one her husband gave her. But the Russian will out: Hair is shorn, kerchiefs are tied, and the Tilda we recognize materializes, which means the jig is almost up. With the company being sold to a blowhard Indian-American (Waris Ahluwalia) against Edo's wishes, the family has lost its mooring, but the news is accepted passively by most of the family, who muster little more than a collective shrug.

This being the kind of film where a misplaced lock of hair and an ill-conceived bowl of soup can give the world away, that's pretty much what happens. It is the aftermath of discovery and an ensuing tragedy that stuns; "frenzied" doesn't begin to describe the take-the-clothes-and-run climax. "You don't exist," Tancredi informs his wife, and it's true: Emma is dead. Thankfully, even in the pre-feminist realm of the Italian bourgeoisie, this neo-Bovary has a shot at an extra life.

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