I AM LOVE
Release date: 9 April
Certificate: 15
119 mins
Italy 2009
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Alba Rohrwacher, Pippo Delbono
English, and Italian and Russian with English subtitles
Channelling the epic power of Tolstoy and Visconti, Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s I AM LOVE sweeps us inside the world of a wealthy Milanese family.
The Recchis are Italian aristocracy, ensconced in an opulent mansion under the iron hand of Emma (Swinton, MICHAEL CLAYTON, THE LIMITS OF CONTROL) and her father-in-law, patriarch Edoardo Sr. Here they are gathered to celebrate Edoardo’s birthday, and hear the succession plans that will determine so many destinies.
But the party is marked by a series of incremental transgressions. As buried secrets are unearthed and hidden passions are ignited, the family dynamic undergoes a subtle but profound transformation, and the clan is forced to confront the limits of its power and self-control.
The result of a seven-year collaboration between Guadagnino and his muse Swinton (who delivers her lines in a fluid combination of Russian and Italian), I AM LOVE is an epic of great subtlety and dazzling power. Featuring a mesmerising score from celebrated minimalist composer John Adams – his first ever work for the screen – this is a sumptuous and refined piece of filmmaking that absorbs and enthrals right up to its dramatic climax.
//Beyond the Family//
Italian cinema has experienced something of a mini-renaissance in recent years, with Paolo Sorrentino’s IL DIVO (2008) and Matteo Garrone’s GOMORRAH (2008) scooping two of the top prizes at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and Gianni Di Gregorio’s MID-AUGUST LUNCH enjoying critical acclaim earlier this year. Guadagnino’s I AM LOVE in many ways nourishes some of the thematic trends that have come to personify Italian cinema; it is a film of great passion, with power, faith and family pulsing through its core.
Guadagnino’s career has overall resisted the more clichéd facets of his native Italy, however, and his latest work is no exception. His is a cinema born out of a classical model, yet I AM LOVE is notably modern in tone, eschewing convention for an altogether more forward-thinking examination of the Italian family.
The Recchis may not seem particularly atypical at first, and their overt intimacy and unity go some way in adhering to a common family dynamic. Yet it is transgression that underpins the progressive narrative, seeking not merely to challenge but to confront Italian cinema’s ingrained social and domestic ideals.
As such I AM LOVE is something of an anomaly, a discernment that manifests in the headstrong actions of its female lead. Where Tilda Swinton’s Russian émigrée, Emma, might typically occupy a more passive narrative space, her intrepid behaviour sees her take the reins as the film’s primary antagonist. So too is her daughter Elisabetta free to explore her own sexual impulses, and it is the profoundness of such self-empowerment that ultimately proves catalytic for the film and the family.
Like Gianni Amelio’s THE KEYS TO THE HOUSE (2004), I AM LOVE examines the fragility of family life and, as with Guadagnino’s own MELISSA P. (2005), it observes female promiscuity from a non-judgemental perspective. In contradicting the themes established by Italian crime drama cinema, however, Guadagnino judiciously prunes back a deep-rooted patriarchal repression, pointing assertively to a new age of Italian cinema
