I Am Love (Lo Sono L’Amore) 

Reviewed by Holly N Richards

Tilda Swinton, queen of modernity, has teamed up with Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s for their third project together - I Am Love (Lo Sono L’Amore).  Released in Italy in September last year Australian audiences are finally being treated to this bold, refreshing and unorthodox film which has left audiences at the Sundance, Venice and Toronto film festivals weak at the knees.

Set in Milan the film opens with a formal lunch party where Edoardo Recchi (Gabriele Ferzetti) is handing his textile and fabric company to son Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), and, unexpectedly, his beloved, soon to be engaged grandson Edoardo Jr (Flavio Parenti). 

Set amongst the upper classes of an Art Deco, new millennium Italy, I Am Love is concerned with a family of great wealth, repression and escapism.  Tancredi’s wife, Emma (Tilda Swinton) is an uneasy victim of clashing cultural hybridity - originally from Russia and ‘new money’.  Emma and Tancredi have another son, Gianluca (Mattia Zaccaro) and a daughter Elizabeth (Alba Rohrwacher), an artist, and as is later revealed a lesbian.  On the evening of the luncheon Eduardo Jr introduces his mother to his close friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a chef, with whom he plans to open a restaurant.  Six months later, Emma, facing an empty nest, takes a trip to Sanremo and encounters Antonio there.  As Edoardo Jr struggles against his newly appointed role in the business and Tancredi remains as distant as ever, an illicit affair of the most unconventional type begins and nothing is ever to be the same again for the Recchi family.

Tilda Swinton, renowned for her ethereal, other-worldly screen presence takes on the self-possessed and self-enclosed Emma beautifully in I Am Love.  From her supremely sophisticated costuming and perfect poise to her apparently impeccable Italian her performance is disgustingly good.  Her family’s house and the architecture of Milan and surrounding areas complement her performance beautifully.  The palatial, art deco abode in particular imposes its grandeur on the characters, especially Emma, making them objects, confining them to a certain way of life. 

Luca Guadagnino has shot the extravagances of upper class society very cleverly with lingering shots, high angles and countless soft, out of focus images.  Admittedly drawing from director Douglas Sirk’s clever brand of melodrama, Guadagnino cheekily directs the viewer gaze in a fabulously boisterous manner.  The liminal space between the director and actors is interesting and makes the audience feel they are at times watching something they aren’t meant to be seeing.  Guadagnino does get carried away at times however and there is a particularly excruciating sex scene which is horribly contrived and could have lasted a quarter of the time with the same effect. 

The sound in this film is delicate with economical, effective use of silence.  The ending of the film first appears abrupt and dramatic but quietly lingers, reeling you back one last time, so cunningly, that it almost feels rude not to wait until the credits have finished rolling. 

Guadagnino, a film buff, harbours a deep love for old fashioned movies which is clear in the sepia tones and art deco theme of the film.  This post-modern, sepia colouring of days passed has been incredibly in vogue in all facets of popular culture in the last year or so – tale for instance Tom Ford’s A Single Man, to which I Am Love is better made and all round superior.

For those who baulk at foreign films, don’t let the prospect of subtitles put you off.  

I Am Love is a visually stunning, intellectually sumptuous film, easily one of the best of 2009 and most likely 2010.  I Am Love starts Thursday 24th June at Cinema Paradiso in Northbridge.

Visit the official I Am Love website here.

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