Salina Art Center

The film opens with preparations for a gathering—a birthday celebration for Edoardo Recchi (Gabriele Ferzetti), wealthy head of a successful textile industry in Milan and patriarch of a large family that includes his Russian-born daughter-in-law Emma (Tilda Swinton).  Director Luca Guadagnino opens I Am Love with a grand feast in which we are introduced to the members of this close-knit Italian family, learn of their loyalties, desires, disappointments, and frustrations.  It’s an audacious way to start the film because it begs comparison to the extended opening scenes of The Godfather and, for Italian film connoisseurs, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard.  Like those earlier masterpieces, I Am Love takes its time, establishing who everyone is and how they relate to one another, and just as importantly, carefully developing the atmosphere of wealth, power, and entitlement that has shaped these characters into what they are.  Like the Corleones and the Salinas (from The Leopard), the Recchis are an aristocratic, conservative family that has unbreakable traditions and unwritten codes of behavior that have dominated their relationships for generations—but like those other families, they have very human passions that threaten to erode that old social order.  The first notes of discord sound when Edoardo makes the surprise announcement that he plans to retire and leave the family business to his son Tancredi (Pippo Delbono)—Emma’s husband—and their son, Edo (Flavio Parenti), who would rather go into the restaurant business.  Tilda Swinton is one of those English actresses who seem “cold” in photographs, where her pale complexion, piercing blue eyes, striking red hair, and placid expression stand out— but in the movies, those porcelain features reveal so much vulnerability, anger, longing, happiness, and disappointment.  One really has to see Ms. Swinton perform to realize that beneath her icy, ethereal beauty she’s one of the cinema’s warmest, most emotionally open actresses.  Her performance as the family outsider is the key to the film’s success.  Speaking perfect Italian with a Russian accent, quietly accepting her “place” beneath the elders of the clan, responding with calm acceptance some potentially explosive revelations—like the fact that her daughter Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher) is gay—Emma is an outsider to her family and her adopted country.  She reveals little, but “still waters run deep,” as the expression goes, and those currents run strongly when Emma visits her daughter in San Remo and happens to see Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), the handsome young chef who prepared the feast for the birthday party.  Compelled by desire, Emma pursues him; they become lovers.  At this point, most films would verge toward the suspenseful: will Emma’s family discover the adultery?  What will their sense of honor demand as punishment for this act?  But director Guadagnino takes the film in a different direction, exploring the effect this affair has on Emma; its cathartic joy makes going back to her old life seem almost impossible, unbearable.  It’s not just that the affair is causing Emma to look differently at her future; it’s also forced her to re-evaluate her past and come to terms with just how isolated she’s been.  Tilda Swinton is simply amazing.  Like Meryl Streep, she does more than master a foreign language or accent—she inhabits the skin of a character that is “foreign” to us, and makes her sympathetic without ever once begging for sympathy.  The performance perfectly complements Guadagnino’s sumptuous, decadent atmosphere—such raw emotion cuts through the complacent gentility of this enclosed world like a knife.  I Am Love is an excellent, mature, intelligent film, a worthy showcase for this underrated actress’s immense talent.