Am I Love

Reviewed by Marc Glassman

I Am Love
Luca Guadagnino, director, co-writer w/Barbara Alberti, co-producer w/Tilda Swinton
Starring: Tilda Swinton (Emma Recchi), Flavio Parenti (Edoardo Recchi, Jr.), Edoardo Gabbriellini (Antonio Biscaglia), Alba Rohrwacher (Elisabetta Recchi), Pippo Delbano (Tancredi Recchi), Marisa Berenson (Allegra Recchi), Gabriele Ferzetti (Edoardo Recchi, Sr.)

Scott Fitzgerald once wrote about the upper class: “they are different from you or me.” Wealth from birth frees one to pursue art, music, architecture, fashion—the finer things in life. But the pursuit of elegance can leave one incapable of dealing with such stressful realities as infidelity and betrayal. For Fitzgerald, that was a tragedy---reread Tender is the Night for validation (and pleasure)---and the Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino must find himself in agreement.

I Am Love, Guadagnino’s extraordinary new film, takes us on a journey through the world of the fabulously wealthy Milanese textile manufacturers, the Recchis. As beautiful as Fitzgerald’s Dick and Nicole Diver, the family is filled with people of exquisite taste and great refinement.

Just as refined is the aesthetic of Guadagnino. He has the eye of an Antonioni and, indeed, this film is a gorgeous homage to L’avventura, L’ecclise and La notte, the seminal trilogy that dissected Italy’s embrace of fashionable materialism during a time of spiritual ennui.

Edoardo, the aging patriarch (played by Gabriel Ferzetti, Antonioni’s lead actor in L’avventura), built a clothing empire but he’s hardly a vulgarian: he loves the pictures made for him by his granddaughter Elisabetta. His wife Allegra is the picture of refinement, matched by the exquisite form and natural poise of daughter-in-law Emma, the wife of their son Tancredi and the mother of Elisabetta, Gianluca and Edoardo, named Junior, though he’s the grandson of the grand pater familias.

We first encounter them at Edoardo Senior’s birthday dinner, which is a fabulous set piece, smaller in scale but thematically analogous to Coppola’s wedding scene in The Godfather and Visconti’s lavish party in The Leopard. Here we understand how a grand Italian family functions when dynasties inevitably change hands. As the party concludes, Edoardo gives the business to Tancredi and Edoardo, Jr, cutting out Gianluca.

Over the course of the next year, Edoardo Senior passes away and the Recchis are offered the chance to globalize their clothing brand by being bought out by a Mid-Asian conglomerate, which would still include them in their corporate plans. Edoardo Junior opposes the proposal due to his emotional tie with his grandfather, who would have insisted on remaining independent, but also finds himself enmeshed in plans to create a costly restaurant in the mountains of Northern Italy with his great friend Antonio, a superb chef.

At the same time, Emma is dealing with the news that Elisabetta is a lesbian, a fact she wants to keep away from the very conservative Tancredi. That’s not all that Emma wants to hide—she is feeling increasingly dissatisfied in their marriage.

Sound operatic? There is a lot of plot but the film is more like Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande than, say, Rigoletto (or anything by Verdi, great master though he is.) It’s more about mood and less about incident. Guadagnino uses the narrative to set up the poetics, which make this film so unusual—and, in a way, quite breathtaking.

This film is really about Emma--only it takes a long time for the viewer to understand it—and that she’s embarking on an affair that will absolutely change her life. You see, Emma slowly falls in love with Antonio, her son Edoardo’s best friend. And Antonio seconds that emotion.

There’s an extraordinary scene in the middle of I Am Love in which Emma is seduced. In public, fully dressed. Emma goes to have lunch with her mother-in-law (a still gorgeous Marisa Berenson) and Gianluca’s wife at Antonio’s Milanese restaurant. Here’s great acting and direction: Tilda Swinton as Emma cuts up a prawn and delicately puts it to her mouth. She eats and her eyes half-close in silent ecstasy. Joyous, though minimal music by John Adams lifts the scene even higher. Emma lifts her lids, sees that her beautiful dining companions are enjoying the repast but not as much as her. So she quietly eats the rest of the prawn, sensually embracing her sin.

Soon afterward, the affair begins in Sanremo between Emma and Antionio. And there’s no turning back though tragedy must surely arise. To reverse any invidious references to Verdi, this film could be compared to La Traviata. It certainly resembles Madame Bovary (whose titular character was named Emma). Composer John Adams, who contributed the score to I Am Love has written about reading Flaubert’s masterpiece: “Immediately upon finishing it, without even a pause to look around or take a deep breath, I began reading a second time. I can’t say that of any novel I’ve ever read—that I’ve wanted to go right back to page one and do it all over again. I now understand why Nabokov says you haven’t really read a book if you’ve just read it once.”

The same is true for I Am Love. This is a film of love, music, poetry and tragedy. See it twice.