I Am Love

Luca Guadagnino, 2009

So I realized watching this film that I'm much more tolerant of and sympathetic toward tales of adultery when the woman is the adulterer. I wonder if men tend to have the opposite reaction. I will say this: when you're a housewife, and your whole life is basically predicated upon being married and raising children, chafing against those constraints and breaking free seems a little more justifiable. Although it's apparently very difficult and stressful to be a man these days, and while I can certainly understand this it may still take me some getting used to. 

I had high hopes from the trailer for some quiet desperation, stately misery, and elegant opulence. It didn't quite deliver that. In his review for Salon, Andrew O'Hehir said that every shot looked like a Vogue spread, but with emotions behind it. He's right about the emotions, but wrong about the Vogue analogy: that implies a static, lifeless thing, and this film is anything like that. The life of the genteel rich doesn't strike one as stuffily oppressive; rather it is a delicate dance, an elaborate balancing act. More than standing beautifully still, everything gleams. And, even before the adultery occurs, the outside world is pressing in and things are bleeding out of the seams. There is a palpable sense of desire, not necessarily yearning to break free, but bubbling over in unexpected ways.

I expected to find Emma, Swinton's character, quietly miserable in her haute bourgeois life. But she positively beams; in spite of the fact that it runs contrary to what we know of the actress as a public person, one finds real pleasure in watching her all femme and elegant. She's good at this life; we see it in the way she effortlessly wraps a ribbon, discarded from an opened present, around her hand, the nurturing assurance with which she comforts her children, her warm manner with the servants. Of course, just because one proves good at something doesn't mean one doesn't yearn for other things. And there's a certain perversity at play; she seems far too young to be shut away with her needlework while the kids party downstairs, and that may be part of the point.

Swinton is a revelation here, and her performance gets deeper and more engrossing as the film goes on. She can make her eyes deep pools or blank slates on command, and it completely transforms her whole face. Expressions of illicit pleasure are delightful; moments of bewilderment and grief are transformative and compelling. Some of the film's finest moments are Emma's interactions with her son Edoardo (Flavio Parenti), full with a conspiratorial air and a natural sympathy that goes beyond mere filial love. For my money, Parenti is the most thrillingly handsome man to grace the screen in recent memory. His Edoardo conveys a nobility and innate goodness that seems to stem from his aristocratic origins, but one feels him too fine for this modern world, not as durable as his mother. He has a fiancee that seems more for display purposes than anything else, and we see more intimacy and tenderness between him and his friend, with whom his mother will have an affair, than with this girl.

It's never a bad idea to make your object of lust a chef; it opens up a realm of lusty pleasures that the film takes full advantage of. We see lots of lovely scenes of food preparation, and one incredible one of Swinton eating that she has already rather cleverly dubbed "prawn-ography." It's a powerful illustration of how, in moments of extreme pleasure, the world seems to fall away. In fact, so engrossed is she in her reverie that the introduction of the man, who she doesn't quite know she wants yet, feels almost like an intrusion.

When sex finally enters the picture, it does so in truncated, rather beautifully abstract form, and it feels very much like the right choice. We see Emma's reaction to it (on the toilet, no less!) and that tells us all we need to now. Later on though, we get plenty of flesh and details including some kind of gross ones (tongues, balls). In fact, when dealing with sex, the film oscillates between beauty and earthy vitality in a really interesting way.

This film uses camera movement in a really interesting way, to move forward toward something, to hint and create suspense. The feeling of suspense is greatly heightened by the excellent score by John Adams. The film also often retreats from scenes to shots of the city or of nature; it's an excellent way of pacing and letting emotions unfold.

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