Reeling: I Am Love (Io sono l’amore)

Posted on 20. Jul, 2010 by Anupa in Film, Reeling, Reviews

How do I love thee Tilda Swinton? Let me count the ways: you can pull off edgy in a way girls half your age would die to be able, you are 50 years old and still more than perceptibly cool, you have collaborated with Viktor & Rolf, been a performance artist, killed your latest Dazed shoot, have two man dem and, most importantly, you are a ginger. This immense bias, hinged upon Tilda’s effortless awesomeness and the fact that I want to be like her when I grow up, is what I took with me to her latest film, I Am Love (Io sono l’amore).

It was two days after watching a ludicrously late showing of Inception that I saw I Am Love, and maybe that’s why the Leo flick’s digitized theatrics have fallen by the wayside. I Am Love was directed by Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, who developed the film with co-producer Swinton over an 11-year period. It’s a labour of love type deal, steeped in that emotion in the way it’s crafted and the story it weaves. A slow-burner, Love tells the story of the Recchi family–turn of the new century industrial scions embroiled in the types of crises endemic to all families (love, trust, identity). Swinton plays the Russian-born lady of the house, Emma, who left the SU for Milano upon marrying heir-to-the-business Tancredi who assumes the position after the death of Nono Recchi. This in turn triggers a series of events that lead to the family’s unraveling. For Emma, it’s the discovery of wanton, life-reviving passion at the hands of her son’s chef friend, Antonio.

Food porn ensues; Emma’s revelatory unspoken monologue occurs while she eats prawns at Antonio’s restaurant, her dining companions swathed in the shadows, the literal spotlight on her. Whether you’re an art person or just, like me, appreciative of pretty things, I Am Love trades in tons of theatrical and cinematic devices. Scenes are awash in pretty colours, evocative framing, closing doors doors doors everywhere in the Recchi household, bountiful open road and optimistic meadows in Antonio’s Sanremo, and a quintessentially Tilda wardrobe supplied by sculputural-chic houses Jil Sander and Fendi. There is indicative imagery in cut-away shots galore, from stoic decor and china and housekeepers in the Milanese Recchi mansion to provincial greenery, insects and nakedness in Sanremo.

Filtered through Guadagnino’s lens, love isn’t the like, you know-peppered demands of MTV or the gendered digital age laments voiced by all-star casts. It’s a story of the different types of love–familial, homosexual, polyamorous, nationalistic—and how it can attack and morph one person beyond even their own recognition. And at its heart, I Am Love reflects a more realistic relapsed romanticism; the kind of thing people turn to when they just can’t take it anymore.

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