A clamorous Italian counterpart to Summer Hours, last year's lyrical meditation on French tradition in decline, I Am Love also examines fading nationalist notions of legacy and institution through the story of a prominent family's slow slide from grace. Or that's one way to look at it: Bold, weird, and a little stalkerish in its intensity, Luca Guadagnino's third feature is an open cinematic buffet, as ready to satisfy as it is to displease, depending on your taste and appetite. It lends itself to a number of persuasive primary readings -- from proto-feminist awakening to sexual-identity crisis; bitter cultural critique to soaring infidelity melodrama; sui generis tour de force to sweaty exercise in the ecstasy of aesthetic influence -- and has plenty of flaws that might be dwelled on as well. It's a lot of movie; the choice is really yours.
The choice of Tilda Swinton to anchor this panoply is no mere casting coup: Guadagnino is something of a Swinton obsessive, and wrote this film for the actress after convincing her to star in a MASH-style short (Tilda Swinton The Love Factory) almost a decade ago. And yet I Am Love is no vanity project; if anything Swinton is pushed to Streep-like feats of above-and-beyond transformation: Oh what, she speaks Italian now? With a Russian accent, you say?
Yes, she speaks Italian now, and with almost the precise fluency one would acquire after 25 years in the country. As Emma Recchi, matriarch of a wealthy Italian family, Swinton is also called upon to project a timid, enigmatic gentility. A mother of three grown children, she long ago forfeited her claim on a recognizable inner life: As the wife of Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), who is heir to the family's textile conglomerate, she is there to keep the dinner parties running on time. After a series of evocative exterior shots of Milan being wrapped in a grey shawl of snow, we move into the heart of the Recchi villa, where one of those dinner parties is about to go off with a single, niggling hitch.
Ready to retire and pass on the reins, Tancredi's father stuns the gathered family -- which includes Emma's sons Edoardo Jr. (Flavio Parenti) and Gianluca (Mattia Zaccaro), and daughter Betta (Alba Rohrwacher) -- by insisting that the company be run by both Tancredi and Edoardo Jr (or Edo, as he is called). "It will take two men to replace me!" the old man crows, straining to exert influence over a future that has already confirmed his irrelevance. In one of the film's more interesting turnarounds, it is the younger Recchi who resists the move to sell after Edoardo Sr. dies; Tancredi is more than willing to sacrifice continuity for a chunk of change.
Several people dress and undress Emma over the course of I Am Love, beginning in the opening scene, when Tancredi is shown putting the pre-party finishing touches on his wife; in a partially obscured long shot, cuffs and a ring are slid onto her hands like boxing gloves. Emma is groomed down to the shine on her teeth, and in a series of sheath dresses, her strawberry blonde hair smoothed back into a Grace Kelly pompadour, Swinton is a portrait of urbane composure. When she meets Antonio (Edoardo Gabriellini), a chef and a friend of Edo's, she is as absently gracious as ever, hardly noticing his continued presence at the house. It is at a ladies' lunch several months later that Antonio's seafood ratatouille puts a spell on Emma; she gets so lost in his creation that she can barely look him in the eye when he comes out to take a bow.
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.