I Am Love (2010)

We keep talking about a human condition that films should aspire to embrace and yet how hollow rings one that only uses words to declare love or suffering. No we forget that all these abstractions are rooted in the here and now of perception as it opens up a world for us. It's above all a perceptive condition behind all the things we cherish, we see this when we try to invoke them again in memory; it's the presence of indelible moment that stays with us, the atmosphere that dilates a room.And this is what I see here, a film about love that resolves spatially, that pushes up all those things that stir the soul and recalls them visually before the eyes, makes glances and gestures out of them. Kar Wai Wong fans will be in heaven.A rich woman falls for the cook friend of her son's who occasionally prepares the fancy meals they enjoy upstairs. She is married, it is a new love that takes the breath away and colors everything. The quest for the filmmaker is to acquire this color in as breathtaking ways as possible.In simple ways often. Her apple red dress as she feels sexual for the first time in ages is a small flourish, but the flowery streets of Sanremo as the feel blossoms give some of the most marvelous spring moods I've seen. There is some ambiguity in the early stages. Did they really kiss or is the kiss wistfully yearned for in her mind? But of course they have and this is all to dilate that cherished memory, show how it spills over from that physical moment to saturate the fabric of life after. We all inhabit feelings in echoes we send out ahead of us and this too, this in particular, is the life films must bring to sight, those that aspire to deep humanity.We get of course codas of how unchecked desire can lead to catastrophe. But the love scene glimpsed before follows shots of insects and plants, showing it to be a natural urge. Her orgasm as branches of trees shuddering in the wind. A lot here is operatic, which has led some to dismiss as gold foil wrapping, empty. The film is set in Milan after all, city of fabrics and opera. It is unmistakably Italian, all about supple sculpting and elegance of form. Medem, even Kusturica in his day, made similar things with a richer confluence of narrative threads, this is occasionally merely luscious.But it is above all about a love that surprises and rends the air with confusion, not just scenery for melodrama; this is what we have so marvelously when early on the woman discovers a written confession (by the daughter) inside a CD, an urge that flies through life and can catch you unawares when you least expect it.We'll have to go to more erudite makers to see how these urges and the form they take arise and subside again, that we're not simply bound to the tide of emotions. Release here is offered as following your urge rather than escaping from its bonds. But we do see how urge rends life like a breeze of air blows through fabrics, with the capacity to remind again of life's capacity to sway and ripple. And how the pursuit of something that colors life with newfound urgency leaves an indelible presence, which is what having lived a life is about in the end. How apt that post- coitus in the small cottage would be cinematically condensed to an open window that looks out to bright day? It's moments like these that define memory and love and let us recall everything else.

The Recchis are an Italian family based in Milan that is quite wealthy from Edoardo Sr's investments in the textile industry. Edoardo's son Tancredi married Emma, who was visiting Italy from Russia. Emma embraced Italian culture and reared Tancredi's son Edoardo Jr (Edo). Edo was a race car driver, and was also interested in starting a restaurant with his long time friend Antonio.As the film progresses, Emma organises dinners for important guests. Edo and Antonio move forward with the restaurant. Edo takes more control of the family business. The family decides to sell the business; this will make them even richer.Emma sees that she is attracted to Antonio; her marriage to Tancredi is depicted as cold from start to finish. Elisabetta (Emma's daughter, Edo's sister) tells Emma that she prefers women to men; this ends up having zero dramatic impact.So...will the sale of the textile plants go as planned to the group from India? Will Antonio and Edo get the restaurant going well? Will Emma's affair with Antonio torpedo everything? -----Scores-----Cinematography: 10/10 Gorgeous, well-executed.Sound: 7/10 OK, I suppose. It did not seem to be a factor in the film. Much of the film is next to silent: footfalls, doors closing, other incidental sounds.Acting: 5/10 Most of the actors have talent, but I did not see much of that talent shine; the performances were dull, listless, uninteresting.Screenplay: 6/10 Long and slow with reasonable character development. Not much of a story was told, with zero characters that I cared about. The ending certainly reinforced that strongly.

Io sono l'amore starts with an impressionist-like picture of a city in winter, reminding a painting by Renoir. Yet, we'll soon realize that we are not at the end of the 19th century but rather 100 years later. The next scene is a party in a very rich people mansion. A family gathers, three generations get together for the birthday of the founding father of the family. He has a big announcement to make about the family heritage, an announcement everybody waits for many years. The relations between the members of the family start to build up under our eyes during the dinner, the old man is obviously in control. Does this remind Coppola's The Godfather? What follows is however a film about the slow decay of the ruling class, a decay that starts from the degradation of the family fabric which does not allow any longer cohesion in face of the forces of economics and history. We are reminded the universe of another great movie – Visconti's Il gattopardo.All these comparisons may seem extremely ambitious for the work of a director, Luca Guadagnino, who is practically at his second feature film only (and the first one seems to have been an erotic teenage drama). Amazing as it may seem, Io sono l'amore is a very complex and daring enterprise that succeeds to compare honorably with the illustrious antecedents it is inspired from and also has a lot to say on its own. The Recchi family in the center of the story is led by strong men who built a textile empire (with dubious origins in the second world war industry, so the Godfather quote is not completely unjustified) and married beautiful women, not always in their own class of super-riches. One of them is Emma (Tilda Swinton), Russian at origin, married to the heir of the empire, leading the house, coordinating the social ceremonies, managing the house economy, raising the children and dealing with their growth and emotional problems. Is she happy? Can she keep together a family that lives in a different age than the one of the ossified bourgeois clans, with some of the younger people trying to break the walls of the conveniences in order to find their vocation or their ways of loving? When the occasion shows up it will be Emma herself who will let her true feelings overcome the conventions, but the way to personal truth may be paved with tragedy. The story of the family relations is carefully constructed and impeccably acted, but there is one moment when the story risks to fall into soap drama. This moment is overcome by the superb acting of Tilda Swinton. I realize now that I missed somehow how huge an actress she is. In one film she succeeds to be at turns high-class cool and passionate, attractive and ugly, young enough to love and fast-aging, in control and completely broken, and all these in one character around whom the whole movie is spinning. At the end, when tragedy had struck, and she has the courage to speak the truth and break the social conventions, she is told by the husband who was a minute ago swearing love and offering protection 'you are nothing'. It is actually the Recchi's who get nothing but emptiness in their lives, and this is the moment when Emma gains back her life and the chance to start again.There are so many beautiful moments of cinema in this film which make it stand on its own and worth remembering even beyond the story itself. There are some amazing moments of camera work, and some haunting fragments of musical score. There is a lot of good acting, and care to the social and relationship details, every corner of the screen is full with characters who live true lives in a realistic and exact composition. There is beautifully filmed nature and there is a lot of interesting food, actually food plays at some moment an important role in the action of the film, as the mean of communication between the characters (one of them is a very talented chef). Guadagnino's movie continues a tradition in the Italian cinema of using family stories to deal with social and political issues and tells again a story which will be worth telling as long as class differences exist and are challenged by history and by emotions.

"I've nothing left to say." Krzysztof Kieslowski said when asked why he stopped making film. Luca Guadagnino has "something to say" but we're all ears that much or just fascinated with this fabulous images!. I think this conflict was greatly illustrated in a surrealistic way with this Philadelphia scene and operatic venture in the background, the look in Emma's eyes was louder than words, she's suffering in a silent mode after delivering parties smoothly to the others, some how she's thinking of breaking this silence but only in her conceptual imagination. Emma do not talk that much in Guadagnino script but you are totally attracted to her in a conceptual way. Once Emma touched by pain she's not the same, and Guadagnino made his touch of perfection on his masterpiece when she's gone.