Remember all the stories about the birds and the bees?
Here's a switch. The birds, the bees, a variety of other insects and all the flowers of the Italian hills are busy learning from Tilda Swinton and Edoardo Gabbriellini, quite wonderful teachers. Director Luca Guadagnino, his focus ever tighter, and composer John Adams, his music swelling ever louder, invade the lovers' privacy to carnal lengths in "I Am Love,' where sex and wealth are on such fabulous display as to test one's ideas of good taste.
The movie, a very good one for lush, romantic, hope chest hiding, summertime viewing despite obvious weaknesses, involves a Milanese family that has been in the fabric business for a long time. Every time we enter the factory, Adams' score goes up-tempo, in rhythm with the powerful chunk-chunk of the looms and the gold that they mine.
We open on a mansion, with a large, well-choreographed cast of servants and kitchen help preparing for a birthday party for Edoardo Ricci, the patriarch (Gabriele Ferzetti). We're in the home of Tancredi (Pippo del Bono), Edoardo's eldest son, head man at the mill. His wife, Emma (Swinton) runs the house. An immigrant from Russia, where she met Tancredi, she has become totally Italian, though she still speaks both languages. Her son, Edo, the familiar form of Edoardo (Flavio Parenti) is a top salesman for the family company; her daughter, Elisabetta (Alba Rohrbacher), is an art student in England.
Emma has been a good and loyal wife, an impeccable hostess, mother of well-trained children, but as the children grow into lives of their own, she feels left out. When she tries to confide in the chief housekeeper, Ida (Maria Paiato), Ida keeps the master-servant gap wide and unbridgeable. Her mother-in-law, Allegra (Marisa Berenson), whose back-combed hair is as rigid as that of dancer Ann Miller, resents the presence of the Russian in the Italian household.
Elisabetta falls in love — with a woman. Edo finds the fabric business less interesting than a restaurant partnership he is seeking with Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a talented, ambitious chef who prepares dishes as if he were making love to a woman. Director Guadagnino and his cinematographer, Yorick Le Saux makes Antonio's preparation as sensual as any I've seen, and after Emma meets him, it has its effect on her.
What is about to happen is as obvious as the nose on your face, and the sequences become a little ludicrous with the over-tight camera closeups, the sunlight hiding the moments of closest contact, the bugs prowling on the leaves and flowers like high-school voyeurs peeping through a window at a couple of necking classmates.
There are four credited screenwriters, director Guadagnino, Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo and Walter Fasano, and while they showed proper restraint in the kitchen, they spoiled the broth in the boardroom and the drawing room, and at the swimming pool, too. The first half of "I Am Love," with a passionate, life-seeking performance from Swinton, is a fine film, but as it descends into melodrama and soap opera, it loses its way badly, and an epilogue after the credits roll does nothing to clarify anything.
By the way, "I Am Love" has a beautiful look, with astounding set decoration, but if that sort of thing is appealing, wait a couple of weeks for "Coco Chanel and Ivor Stravinsky," perhaps the most beautiful film I've ever seen.
"I Am Love" opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
–Joe