THE PUNISHMENT OF LUXURY : Luca Guadagnino’s ‘I Am Love’ [8/10]
The welcome, long-overdue revival of Italian cinema – Il Divo, Gomorrah, etc – now clicks into even higher gear with I Am Love, the breakthrough third feature by the Sicilia-born (1971), Ethopia-raised writer-director Luca Guadagnino. His previous efforts – 1999’s The Protagonists and 2005’s Melissa P – didn’t manage to obtain much distribution outside Italy, but surely will soon be quickly disinterred by adventurous film-festivals keen to stage mini-retrospectives for this exhilaratingly bold “new” talent.
Microscopic in its observation but epic in its passions, I Am Love chronicles yet another of cinema’s opulently rich but deeply dysfunctional families – this time the Recchis, a Milanese dynasty who have made their considerable fortune from the textile business. In a small ensemble cast, very much first among equals is Emma (Tilda Swinton), the Russian-born wife of fiftyish patriarch Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) – the latter co-inheriting the reins of empire, along with his son Edoardo (Flavio Parenti) – following the death of Tancredi’s father, Edoardo Sr (Gabriele Ferzetti.)
Material comforts only go so far from Emma, however, and her long-rumbling dissatisfactions are catalysed into something more active – and dangerous – when she falls in love with Edoardo’s friend and business-partner, chef Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini.)
And few recent films have been quite so good at the falling part of “falling in love” – Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2003) is perhaps the closest comparison. As with Anderson’s transcendent masterpiece, the very celluloid of I Am Love seems affected, perhaps even in-fected, by the sublime thrills of amour fou. Walter Fasano’s editing and Yorick Le Saux’s cinematography are heavily stylised – sometimes swoony, sometimes jagged – so that we’re immersed in an alternative, heightened form of awareness and consciousness from start to finish (even the opening and closing titles are delightfully, elegantly old-school), aware of each moment’s individual character.
This heightening is illustrated most powerfully in the scene where Emma, out to lunch with friends, manifests an orgasmic (but silent) reaction to a prawn dish which Antonio has prepared. This is the pivotal moment as their relationship moves from passing acquaintance to something more profound. Not since District 9 has prawn been deployed so fascinatingly on film – and Emma’s reaction to its splendours provide an intoxicatingly arthouse variation on the “I’ll have what she’s having” histrionics of When Harry Met Sally.
Epiphanies, grace-notes and elaborate set-pieces abound, many of them striking in their audacity – indeed, Guadagnino certainly isn’t afraid to skirt pretentiousness, even absurdity, with some of his choices as both writer and director (a murky post-credits coda involving a cave will strike many as a symbolic-poetic flourish too far.)
This is soap-opera with the emphasis on the opera, a rarefied but bonkers affair that’s roughly two-thirds Luchino Visconti (The Leopard is perhaps the most obvious touchstone), two-thirds Dario Argento – with a fraction more in that over-running cup of John Huston’s The Dead.
The fact that I Am Love‘s editor/co-writer Fasano recently performed exactly the same functions on horror-maestro Argento’s deliriously off-kilter The Third Mother (2007) is surely a significant detail (also collaborating on I Am Love‘s script: Barbara Alberti and Ivan Cotroneo.) And with Argento’s star on the wane for some time now, it’s to be hoped that Guadagnino might consider going the whole hog and making a horror movie of his own next time out – ideally in collaboration with his leading-lady/producer Swinton, whose performance (speaking Russian and Russian-accented Italian throughout) is much more than merely an impressive technical feat. Though of course it is a feat – one notably show-offy element in an enterprise that is decidedly unafraid of showing off.
Just as David Thomson, in his latest book, refers to the “moment of Psycho,” the period since her Oscar win for Realm and Conquest Michael Clayton has been very much the “moment of Tilda,” the actress using her position and prominence to ensure funding for unlikely, unashamedly auteur projects such as I Am Love (fingers crossed that Tilda’s moment lasts for a decade or more.)
Not that unlikely, unashamedly auteur projects always come off, of course – even Guadagnino’s picture, written as it is in bold, underlined italics has its share of mis-steps, moments when technique triumphs at the expense of plausibility, coherence and consistency of tone. But these are far outweighed by the sequences and moments of magic that Guadagnino and his collaborators weave, many of them crucially dependent upon the modern classical works of John Adams – a composer who has previously been notably reluctant to get involved with the movies.
Vibrant, energising and often bracingly discordant, Adams’ music, more than a dozen examples of it, propels I Am Love forward to its astonishing climax – involving one of cinema’s great ecstatic embraces and also one of its great disappearing-acts: not so much “I am love” as “I am — out of here!”
Neil Young
15th April, 2010
I AM LOVE : [8/10]
aka Io sono l’amore : Luca GUADAGNINO : Italy 2009 : 119m (BBFC) : {21/28}
seen 12th April 2010 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£7.00)
further reading…
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue=2&id=30