The Orange County Screenwriters Association
Be Inspired, Do Good Work

Wednesday, 05 May 2010 16:53

I Am Love (Io Sono L’amore)

Rate this item
(0 votes)

i am loveIn “I Am Love” (Io Sono L’amore), Tilda Swinton plays Emma, the matriarch of a rich bourgeois Italian family. Wooed from her native Russia by Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), the heir of a Milanese textile fortune, she becomes his perfect wife and ideal mother to their children. She’s trim, stylish, controlled, yet warm; she keeps everyone around her on their mark, she plans family gatherings with precision, she councils wisely. Still, despite outward appearances there’s something unsettled in her.

Although she fully embraces the Italian culture (she speaks the language impeccably, she knows her place in male/female protocol), she remains an outsider and seems unfulfilled. This yearning enables her to understand and accept her daughter, Betta’s (Alba Rohrwacher) newly discovered gay sexuality. It also allows for her own lusty awakening as she falls for her son, Eduaordo’s (Flavio Parenti) best friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini).

Under Antonio’s spell, Emma is taken down and stripped raw. He cuts her hair; arouses the peasant in her. She experiences pleasure in a new and potent way. The film swells and crescendos melodramatically and careens toward Edoardo’s shocked discovery of his mother’s affair after which tragedy strikes. John Adams’ bold orchestral score accompanies the trajectory of love and tragedy with operatic intensity, driving the pace of the action of the film to a feverish pitch. The music almost becomes as strong a voice as any other character.  

Writer-director Luca Guadagnino subtly infuses the film with an undercurrent ofIo Sono L’amore religiosity. He gives us ceremonial and ritualistic depictions of opulent meals as if they were modern day high masses and then strikes us with the unspoken penitential sentence of death in answer to Emma’s adultery. Despite the changes of mores in modern Italian culture, these powerfully ingrained themes still emerge as very much a part of their story telling.

Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s palate aptly takes us from the gray chilled Milan to the bright hot Sanremo in parallel to Emma’s transformation from cool isolation into fiery passion.

There’s a lot to admire in this film--no one could better inhabit Emma’s journey that Swinton, but it somehow unravels at the end with Tancredi’s abrupt and brutal excommunication of her. It’s not the utter tragedy of the situation that unsatisfies, it’s the manner in which it’s delivered. The story becomes too truncated. We’ve sat patiently through a very slow build up and then we’re unceremoniously dropped on our heads without so much as an explanation. Just as Emma would never send her guests away without dessert, we, as, viewers, shouldn’t be sent away without a proper explanation.

"I Am Love" is directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Luca Guadagnino (story), Luca Guadagnino (screenplay) & Barbara Alberti (screenplay) &
Ivan Cotroneo (screenplay) & Walter Fasano (screenplay) 

I’ll give it a 7. The orange isn’t quite ripe, it’s still a bit tart.
 

Read 1909 times Last modified on Wednesday, 05 August 2015 16:14
Published in Front Page Item - old
Mark Sevi

Latest from Mark Sevi

More in this category: « How My Journalistic Dreams Came To Be What If? »
Login to post comments
back to top

Copyright (c) Orange County Screenwriters Association
Fair Use Statement

Fair use refers to the right to reproduce, use and share copyrighted works of cultural production without direct permission from or payment to the original copyright holders. It is a designation that is assigned to projects that use copyrighted materials for purposes that include research, criticism, news reporting and teaching. When a project is protected under fair use provisions, the producers of that project are not subject to sanctions related to copyright infringement. The maintenance of fair use protections is central to many non-profit and education projects, especially those that operate in digital and online spaces.

This website may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright holders. The material is made available on this website as a way to advance research and teaching related to critical media literacy and intercultural understanding, among other salient political and social issues. Through context, critical questioning, and educational framing, the Orange County Screenwriters Association, therefore, creates a transformative use of copyrighted media. The material is presented for entirely non-profit educational purposes. There is no reason to believe that the featured media clips will in any way negatively affect the market value of the copyrighted works. For these reasons, we believe that the website is clearly covered under current fair use copyright laws. We do not support any actions in which the materials on this site are used for purposes that extend beyond fair use.

off canvas menu

Joomla! Debug Console

Session

Profile Information

Memory Usage

Database Queries