Directed by Luca Guadagnino. Starring Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, Marisa Berenson, Gabriele Ferzetti, Edoardo Gabbriellini 16 cert, Cineworld/IFI/Light House, Dublin, 120 min
An old-money Italian family gets its comeuppance in a decadently over-the-top drama that must be seen to be believed, writes DONALD CLARKE
THE OPENING credits alone make it clear that you are about to experience a film that is very much at home with lusciousness. Elegant titles fail to obscure gorgeously snowy Milanese roofs, while the surging chords of John Adams (the US composer features throughout) make the ground safe for rampaging melodrama.
Then we enter the villa of the sinisterly powerful Recchi family. In a scene that recalls both King Learand The Godfather, the family's ageing patriarch (Gabriele Ferzetti), celebrating his birthday at a grand dinner, announces that the business is to pass, as expected, to his son Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) and (more surprising this) his grandson Edoardo Jr (Flavio Parenti).
Look at the clothes. Look at the food for heaven’s sake. Every square centimetre of pasta, every brass button, every beam of sunlight appears to have been painted on the screen by a fanatically painstaking photorealist.
The appearance of Marisa Berenson as the older Mrs Recchi reminds us of Barry Lyndon and Stanley Kubrick’s own famous dedication to perfection. Luca Guadagnino, the youngish Italian director of this undeniably impressive feature, is not nearly in that league, but his work does recall a recurring conflict in Kubrick’s more honed films: such is the manic discipline, you never know whether to applaud the achievement or scream in oppressed frustration.
Happily, Tilda Swinton is on hand to contribute a few rough angles and surprising edges to the piece. The towering Scottish actor plays Emma, a Russian emigre who has been married to Tancredi for some years. The film’s second act kicks off when Emma encounters a friend and business partner of her son and begins a predictably disastrous affair. Meanwhile, the daughter of the family comes to terms with her own lesbianism.
Recalling great declining families such as those in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooksand Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, the Recchi clan begins to tear itself into beautifully neat little pieces.
Swinton’s growing guilt and desperation add salt to a dish (food metaphors are unavoidable) that could, otherwise, have congealed into something richly indigestible. It’s hard to think of another actor who could shoulder such an array of conflicting demands – moral centre, immoral annihilator, delicious exotic – while still remaining proudly upright.
Tilda's formidable oddness does, however, only add to the sense of unreality that hangs over I Am Love. Conspicuous artificiality is, of course, not necessarily something to be shunned in cinema. I Am Loveis, however, so primped and primed that it often feels a little suffocating.
Moreover, as emotions run high and dynasties tremble, it remains difficult to discern quite how decadent or depraved the central family is supposed to be. The rampantly indiscreet Guadagnino has, in interviews, argued that he prefers the less disordered societies of the US and the UK to what he calls the right-wing quasi-anarchy of Italy. But it is ritual and tradition that has defanged the Recchis and, paradoxically, the film cannot hide its affection for the beautiful order in which they wallow.
All those qualifications noted, this is one of those rare films whose flaws are almost indistinguishable from its virtues. A less operatic, grittier, more disordered version
of I Am Love is not merely an undesirable prospect; it is, however hard you may strain your brain cells, an inconceivable one.
Working on a limited budget, the director has managed to tip his hat to greater extravagances of classic Italian cinema while still devising a few new arias of his own.
In other words, it has to be seen to be believed.
