Review: I Am Love

Despite Tilda Swinton's strong screen presence, this Italian epic stumbles into overblown melodrama.

By Todd Detmold
Published: July 2nd, 2010 | 9:25am

In I Am Love, we meet several people confused and flustered by their changing notions of what love is and for whom they feel it. The scattered film sports consistently engaging performances and characters who are interesting enough to anger you when a ludicrous third-act development derails the whole production. Ultimately it amounts to a narratively standard spectacle about breaking free from the doldrums of married life with nothing approaching a satisfying resolution. We are not supposed to notice—we're supposed to be distracted by the booming score.

The film begins with an elderly patriarch, who in the midst of a lavish birthday celebration, bequeaths his textile business to both his son, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), and grandson, Edo (Flavio Parenti). Tancredi is offended and Edo doesn't know what to do with his new power. Despite being tangentially related to this seemingly central conflict, Tancredi's wife Emma (Tilda Swinton) emerges as the main character.

Edo gets to share the family business with his dad, and spends the duration of the film trying to preserve the status quo (Tancredi wants to sell and Edo does not) but also dedicatedly furthering the career of Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), an expert chef mired on the lower rung of his own Daddy's business. Edo is a traditionalist but also an opportunist; he also has a gorgeous Italian wife of little personality and increasing pregnancy. He wants cake and he wants to eat it, too.

If these plot elements come across as trite, that's because they are. Writer-director Luca Guadagnino is preoccupied with his camera and his score, giving loud punctuation to extreme close-ups and inadvertently forcing a wall between his audience and the characters that are so important to a family melodrama. Rather than let them breathe, he stifles everyone on screen.

Take Emma and Tancredi's daughter, Betta (Alba Rohrwacher), who is off at art school in London for the majority of the film. She makes pivotal, sporadic appearances. First she is revealed to be a lesbian; later, hair cut short, she comes out to Emma with Polaroids of her girlfriend and finally meets Edo in London to shrug off the family's wealth. Now here's an interesting character: Betta gets an all-expenses-paid education in the most expensive city in the world and in the least lucrative field (at the opening birthday party, she gives her grandfather a printed photograph-rather than a painting-earning derision from the entire family who all have set expectations for her art). All the while, she hides her homosexuality from the patriarchy that's paying for it, telling Edo it doesn't matter if they sell the business, because it'll only make them richer. She implies that the money isn't worth much, and that she wishes they had less.

Betta and Edo love each other and their few scenes together reveal a touching partnership. But those moments are fleeting, while their mom gets lengthy montages wandering through the jungle (more on this in a second). Edo is the only one in active pursuit of a resolution to his lingering daddy issues, and he's too much of a wuss to get anything done before the film collapses in the third act. Betta emotes when she's there but Guadagnino isn't interested in getting under her skin and digging out a Betta from whom we can glean any value. We're left with one child wanting and failing and the other failing to want (not to mention a third, the barely noticeable youngest son Gianluca).

Swinton's star-power makes her Emma the clear protagonist of this story—perhaps also a result of director and actress developing a story together and failing to realize their supporting characters are much more interesting. Heretofore sidelined by the wealthy family she married into and stuck in her boring marriage, Emma rediscovers sex and goes down the rabbit hole. She goes for a meal at Antonio's restaurant and he cooks up a sensual ratatouille ("A peasant dish!"). Immediately Emma and Antonio begin sleeping together. She chops off her hair and hides in the mountains, and their lengthy sex scenes are intercut with close-ups of body parts and beads of sweat with bugs sucking the pollen off flowers. Swinton is a dynamic actress, in turns erotic and demonic. But she's not strong enough here to play the crutch upon which Guadagnino wants to rest his whole story.

The title I Am Love comes from the Italian Io sono l'amore, an apparently literal transfer. I'm left wondering if there's any kind of idiomatic entendre lost in translation that might tie the thing together. I'm not sure which of these characters that first person is, but such a statement only reminds us that the word has a gazillion meanings and anybody who purports to be some kind of theoretical personification of so malleable and bizarre an enigma as "love" is just full of it. If Guadagnino is trying to teach us any lessons here, his final product is too frayed and unfocused for any of them to take.