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I Am Love (2010)

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Time Out rating

Average user rating

46 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

A work of masterly daring and skill, the new Italian film ‘I Am Love’ plays out in the late 1990s within a super-rich family called the Recchis. Their power base is a Milanese villa introduced to us by young director Luca Guadagnino as a gilded cage – a marble-and-stone palace too large and ornate to support intimate family life. In the film’s early scenes Guadagnino laps up this mansion, exploring it with a swirling, fluid camera that turns its world into a character itself. The fictional Recchis recall the Agnellis, another troubled industrialist family which feathered its nest on the back of fascism, but they trade in textiles, not cars, and Guadagnino gives us a brief shot of their mechanised looms at work to stress how business is woven into the fabric of this family’s soul.

We meet the Recchis on the cusp of change – and change is the film’s main interest, along with the dangerous strength necessary for any woman to counter the forces of tradition and expectation in such a family. We begin by watching the elderly family head (Gabriele Ferzetti) at dinner as he nominates his successors in a scene of ‘King Lear’-like power and unnaturalness. But soon he is dead and our focus and heroine becomes Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton), the dutiful Russian wife of Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), the family’s new head, and mother to two grown-up sons and a daughter attempting her own flight from this patriarchal world. Emma’s burgeoning friendship with her son’s business partner, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a rural chef, is the nudge that will bring this house of cards down in dramatic, tragic fashion.

The story is bold enough, but true daring is at play in the film’s style. Guadagnino has the confidence to mix big, brash ‘Dallas’-style establishing shots of Milan and London and complicated scenes of busy parties with much more intimate, expressive moments. Dialogue becomes less important as the film progresses, and Guadagnino invites us to read the film rather than the characters’ lips. He also manages to bring the film to an operatic crescendo without losing sight of emotional realities.

There are many reasons to recommend this sensual and good-looking film about personal and female liberation. The music is one; it is central to a work that demands that all the film’s elements work together to create a total cinema. Guadagnino and his star and co-producer, Swinton, persuaded John Adams, the composer of operas such as ‘Nixon in China’ and ‘Doctor Atomic’, to allow his work to be used in a film for the first time and his crashing, arresting, impulsive music is gripping from the start.

It’s a fitting collaboration. Adams has given modern opera a much-needed shot in the arm and that’s what Swinton (who speaks Italian throughout) and Guadagnino are striving to achieve: ‘I Am Love’ is a brazen blueprint for a cinema that straddles past and future while worrying little about trends of the present. It’s a bold experiment rooted in tradition. It plays like smart opera and looks like a marriage of poetic documentary with classical European drama. Swinton and Guadagnino call it ‘Visconti on acid’ and that’s as good a phrase as any to describe the film’s intoxicating allure.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 2068, 8-14 April, 2010

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User reviews of this film

Tracy Trenfield said...

Posted on Dec 18 2011 16:55 Omg I guess I am lost in the sauce because I couldn't even figure out what the emotion was at the end I thought she was running for her life thought maybe her Italian family was going to put a hit out on her especially since she flinched from her husband and the maid looked like she was packing to save her life...but maybe I'm right think about it.

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anon said...

Posted on May 15 2011 12:10 This was pretentious twaddle. Prior to seeing this, I was a big tilda swinton fan. This appears to be a parody as developed by an Italian alternative comedy group, I understand she is going to continue working with this director (per Sight and Sound). This film was so bad that by mid film, it ceased to be funny bad. The music was irritating and somewhat inappropriate, Swinton's Italian is excreable, what more can I say? This film was, as the Italians say, far figura.

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majzi said...

Posted on May 01 2011 20:30 Amazing.

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Alanis said...

Posted on Apr 02 2011 19:17 A total, utter, failure. The hypertrophic egos of Guadagnino and Swinton should be lambasted for ever for such a pretentious, arrogant, monumental wank .
Never, ever an actress was so badly cast. For God's sake, how credible is Tilda Swinton as a smoking hot sex bomb in Italy? Her awful Italian is embarassingly pathetic .How does she dare? Who does she think she is to pull it off? Obviously vanity has gone to her head to such a level that she has lost all sense of reality. The moment in which she cries " IO AMMMO ANTHOONIO!" must enter the hit parade of Cinema's most ridiculous ever line. Boring, pretentious, messy, completely unsexy, terrible acting, and the beauty of the cinematography sadly does not save a completely pointless film..

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Jane said...

Posted on Jan 24 2011 00:30 i watched this film last night - I cried at the end, the maid was unreal, her acting ability was so moving, and I loved how all the pieces of the characters fell into place near the end, what a genius film!! a friend did describe it as italian vogue meets river cottage, which was very funny !

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Albert said...

Posted on Oct 16 2010 22:13 Brilliant.
Ravishing, tense and atmospheric, and Tilda Swinton gets her baps out.
What more do you want you crumbs?

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Jo. said...

Posted on Sep 15 2010 06:04 Great scenery, cinematography and acting. All budding philosophers should appreciate Plato's cave at the end!

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Winifred said...

Posted on Aug 05 2010 21:08 A terrible film. I felt cheated by the reviews. The scenes were unbearably pretentious. Who cares about these characters and their relationships? I waited for the film to finish. It was a waste of time!!!

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chris terry said...

Posted on Jul 21 2010 21:06 I don't know how many people have been so fooled by a film as shallow and self-indulgent as this overdressed, overwrought piece of soap, that lacks a single believable emotional moment or performance, shot or cinematic gesture. It is a cliche from start to finish whose only excuse can be that it was a sort of vanity project by Tilda Swinton, whose name appears on the producer credits too. To mention it in the same breath as Visconti borders on cinematic blasphemy. The ending is as predictable as it is ridiculous. For its sheer unremitting banality in the face of its monumental pretensions, I Am Love must be one of the worst films of the century so far.

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Francesca said...

Posted on Jul 06 2010 23:46 unbearably slow, terribly boring and unnecessarily highfaluting.

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flobajob said...

Posted on May 29 2010 12:39 This film which purported to be an involving drama was more of a visual feast than enything else. Over-indulgent shots of food, architecture and the countryside do not make a cohesive narrative. The film leaned heavily towards the pretentious, leaving the characters artifical, unreal and unlikeable. If this is a masterpiece then I must lack the "intelligence" to appreciate it perhaps?? Even the music was unsuitable. A great advert for the Italian tourist board-not much else.

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Paul said...

Posted on May 11 2010 23:35 I was unprepared for this film and shocked by what I must call a 'tour de force' describing an Italian film. A fantastic film and I will probably go and see it again. Not the sort of film I would normally expect to like, but this was good, damn good and gets my first five stars of the year.

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Ted Bolt said...

Posted on May 09 2010 18:17 A film for people so 'up themselves' they think it is worth offering a review online as if anyone cared what they thought. I loved it. Especially the sex.

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RCO'G said...

Posted on May 07 2010 17:53 As per Dave Calhoun. Pure, total cinematic experience. Superb Filmmaking simple as that.

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iain Stringer said...

Posted on May 03 2010 20:14 I just like that she ran away to become her real self- and become LOVE, rather than trying to be something she wasn't- PRETENSE. Her daughter was having a similar time!!!!!
Iain

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