When I remember Milan I remember the rain passing in sheets down the filthy sidewalks. Something about that city repelled me, whether it was its sleek arrogance, the cold people in coal colored clothing, or the ugly modern sprawl that grew like a moss out over the once decimated city. Normally, I prefer the cities in Europe that war has forced to reinvent themselves – Glasgow over Edinburgh, Rotterdam over Amsterdam, Berlin over Munich (many, many times). I found that the cities forced to pick themselves out of the rubble had a raucous gritty humor, a bulky sort of optimism, a learned recklessness, and a laughing cynicism. Milan reinvented itself in a way that disgusts me. It came out of its tragedy wearing a business suit and a humorless smile.
I Am Love, directed by Luca Guadagnino, keenly examines Milan in the act of reinventing itself by following the dynasty of an Italian family. It opens, as The Godfather does, with a transferral of power, the moment that the Recchi family patron, a textile mill owner, hands over his empire to his son and his grandson, Edo. Within the larger tapestry of the moment in Recchi family history, the film follows the threads of several stories belonging to members of the family, or close relations. Emma – the Recchi Wife – falls in love with Edo’s friend Antonio, a chef. Betta – the daughter – moves to London and discovers a kind of love she has to hide from her family. Edo, more understanding and sensitive than the other men in his family, sits at the center of everything. As the rising power in the family, he has to grapple with the changes his father makes to his grandfather’s vision of a company, play confidant to Betta, and help Antonio set up his own restaurant.
A dinner scene as still as a painting.
Guadagnino focuses primarily upon Emma’s – Tilda Swinton’s – story. Emma, we begin to understand, feels like an outcast because she comes from Russia and is therefore an outsider within the Recchi family, as present and mute as a decoration at family events. Edo is the only member of the family who really understands her. At the opening feast Antonio, a chef who becomes Edo’s friend by beating him in a race, arrives with a cake and meets Emma. Something about the meeting disturbs her. Later, Betta’s admission that she’s a lesbian waters a seed of curiosity within Emma. You get the feeling Emma hasn’t thought about love in so long, her curiosity is almost innocent. Emma travels to the city where Antonio lives and chases after him. They fall in love.
I Am Love works more like a painting than a script. Broad ripples of feeling travel this film and only meet a few islands of crucial dialogue. Of course, when the family does business or makes polite conversation, people speak, but this usually amounts to white noise, or threatening white noise. The longings in the film go unvoiced and are satisfied without words. Because Emma lives for most of the film firmly in the Recchi’s world with an outsider’s desires and feelings, her true feelings must not only go unsaid most of the time, but they are irrelevant. She moves from this world where she is merely a “Recchi wife” to the simple and natural Arcadia of Antonio’s land. Now words don’t need to get in the way of love. Ida, the maid, who acts as Emma’s refuge, manages to support Emma’s love affair without ever admitting she’s doing so. She supports Emma gently, protecting her feelings with an action so simple and discrete as closing the curtains firmly when Emma eats a private meal Antonio makes. There is only one point in the movie that Ida admits her feelings for Emma, and its heart breaking. Edo, for instance, supports his mother and sabotages his father by demanding Emma make “ucha” – a Russian dish – at all the family meetings. Emma learns of her daughter’s lesbianism by way of a note tucked into a CD. Scenes revolve around mislaid shoes, thrown purses, and are like scalpels left lying about, that offer great insight into the characters. The film puts much faith in symbolism. In that way, the film, which subscribes to all the old rules of film composition, makes an interesting point with the camera lens itself. It hones in on the subversive elements that grow quietly in the cracks of the family’s very traditional portrait, the objects out of place. Toothbrushes, bags and combs become mute witnesses to a rebellion.
The film subscribes to an Old School and indeed Guadagnino dusts his camera lenses with something from the nineteen forties. He seems to follow the logic of his characters, who believe that despite the inviting changes in the world, we have to look to the past for happiness. Shots are composed in classical thirds. Every scene opens with an establishing shot of something famous, a map maybe, or a clear indication that we are nowhere we’re meant to know. Moments of love between characters transition between sweating backs and insects, busily at work on flowers. You can almost hear Guadagnino saying to himself; “This is love. This is a flower. This is happiness. This is sadness.”
Like the subject in a fine painting, the actress is crucial to this role. Tilda Swinton occupies this wordless, but deeply feeling and felt, presence as only a master can and makes Emma Recchi a vivid, colorful shadow. She manages to be austere and at time inscrutable, at others shockingly bare, she’s elegant and poised, always sliding about the border of events. She’s sometimes mute, petrified, and at other moments she’s wonderfully free and brave. In other words, she’s a middle aged woman. Guadagnino treats this subject delicately, for which I have to give him a lot of credit. Movies about women finding themselves and finding their power make me suspicious, at times. This suspicion applies to any kind of film that attempts to make up for a real world injustice with an artistic inversion. An injustice makes people want to tell us how things should be, but how things should be aren’t always true. Movies with good, believable, strong female leads are as exceptional as they are rare because of the balance they require. I Am Love, like its character, has perfect poise.
Soundtrack: John Adams. Bumpy and boisterous, full of horns, reminiscent of John Williams in Catch Me If You Can.
Bottom line: An elegant treatment of a simple love story at a moment in Milan’s crisis of identity.
My Rating: 7.8
The Cinematic Katzenjammer 