I Am Love (Sunday, July 4, 2010) (64)

I Am Love is a technical work of beauty, but rather pedestrian as a narrative. Writer/director Luca Guadagnino does a beautiful job creating a sumptuous world, filling it with joys for all the senses.

The trite story revolves around a super rich family in Milan who have one of the biggest homes I have ever seen in my life or onscreen. It is a marvel of Art Deco decoration with 30-foot ceilings throughout. The wife, Emma (played by Tilda Swinton) is a bit bored with her life, though and looking for distractions. Her son is about to take over the family business and her daughter has moved to London for an art school and has come out as a lesbian. One day she meets a close friend of her son who is a chef. Between his delicious food and his beautiful Italian youth, she falls in love with him, and he falls in love with her. They begin an affair that could ruin her marriage and her family.

To begin with, the score, by master minimalist composer John Adams is absolutely transcendent and fabulous. From the opening titles, this puts you in a super modern setting. It is unquestionably Adams and also fits in beautifully in the lusciousness of contemporary Milan. For his first film score, Adams does an amazing job.

Then Guadagnino gives us shot after shot after shot of absolutely delicious food. Like other great food movies (Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Big Night) this makes our mouths water and is so vivid that we think we can smell the steam as it wafts above the plates. It's best not to see this on an empty stomach.

All of the sets are magnificent and perfectly Art Deco, like the house. Because of the size of the rooms, the furniture is all oversized giving the sense of extreme comfort, but also jarring perspective (will I get lost in the enormous sofa?). The last shot of the film is of the massive golden carpet that covers the entry atrium of the house. This massive yellow field fills up the screen and is both powerful and dramatic - even though it is monochrome. Of course, being in Milan, the costumes are totally fabulous as well. This is an extremely wealthy family and they dress immaculately.

Overall the rather dull story is masked by a beautiful operatic style. I guess the melodrama fits in well with such a format, but it does get a bit tedious - as the woman's choices are to leave the amazingly privileged and loving environment of her family and home for a poor chef she has a crush on, or to go off with him and maybe find another happy life. It's a bit of an unbalanced choice, I think, and a bit of an overdone, over-romantic look at the world (in a million years this woman would never make such a choice - only in an opera).

Swinton is very good as a Russian/Italian mother (she moved from Moscow at some point in the past and became Italian the moment she got off the plane, she says). She's warm, elegant and loving, if a bit self-concerned and short-sighted. Her son, played by Flavio Parenti is also very good. He is proud and traditional and wants to make his parents happy. He's a bit of a dreamer, and, I think, has massive oedipal issues that come out very realistically.

If we can separate what we see and experience here from the story itself, this is be an easy one to break down. It gets top points for everything technical (score, production design, costumes), but very low points for the script. Overall it's a beautiful movie and one that really does excite all of our senses (including taste, smell and touch - a very hard thing to achieve on film). It's just a lousy story vehicle to get to that stage.

Stars: 2.5 of 4