I Am Love is a film that I’m having a hard time attacking as a review. It’s a detail rich, meticulously thought out, finely crafted piece of art, for sure. Every moment that you sit in its audience you will be engaged with challenging images, symbolic depth, and the intricacies of fine acting. When I left the theater I had a mini novel of notes on all of the things that struck me during the viewing. But then I realized that they weren’t notes appropriate for a review, but more for an academic dissecting of a literary work. I had catalogued a multitude of cases of imagery and symbolism that tied into the themes of the film, multiple bits of foreshadowing that pointed to where the film was heading, tons of visual cues to help illuminate you about the changes the characters were going through. But, was any of it going to be of any use? Can you talk about the themes of this film without giving the entire thing away? Can you catalogue bits of foreshadowing without delving into that always dreaded “spoiler territory”? When everything in a film builds, very specifically and skillfully toward an emotional catharsis, what can you give away without spoiling that moment of catharsis for your reader? Honestly I’m not sure, and even now I’m not totally certain what I’m going to write after this paragraph, but what I can say for certain is that I Am Love is a complex, well crafted example of cinema as art that any lover of film would be foolish to pass up checking out.
While the story of this film isn’t the thing about it that I found to be most interesting or most important, it would be a writing exercise more complex than I’m willing to tackle right now to get through a review without coughing up some summary of the sometimes convoluted, oftentimes overly dramatic familial interactions that make up the plot of I Am Love. The life, times, and impending changes in both, of the obscenely wealthy Recchi family is what makes up the meat of the film. We open on a birthday celebration for the family’s patriarch Edoardo (Gabriele Ferzetti) who announces both his retirement from helming the family’s textile empire and the names of his successors. Instead of passing down the top position to his son Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) as expected, Edoardo announces that Tancredi must share the position with his son Edo (Flavio Parenti). The announcement is rife with controversy and tension, and its repercussions make up the bulk of the film. Edoardo wants the business to keep running the same way and stay in the family, but Tancredi wants to sell off to a larger conglomerate. Edo wants to stay loyal to his grandfather’s wishes, but seems more interested in starting a posh restaurant with his chef friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) than he does actually running the textile business. And at the center of it all is Emma (Tilda Swinton), Tancredi’s wife, Edo’s mother, and the stone-faced rock that keeps the family together. While I Am Love is a fairly sprawling story with a great ensemble cast, the heart of the film is Emma’s story. She’s the one who goes through the biggest changes, she’s the one whose decisions most greatly affect the others around her, and it’s Swinton’s acting that is the main selling point of the film.
The opening scenes of the film feel very travelogue. We’re given still shots of sights and monuments around Milan covered in a freshly fallen snow. Upon your initial viewing the sequence appears to be little more than establishing shots to make clear the setting of the film, but the more you watch I Am Love, the deeper you dig into it, the more you start to realize that everything you’re being shown is shown to you for a reason, and usually several layered reasons. These images of Milan’s statues and landmarks are repeated at the end of the film, this time a freshly fallen rain replacing the layer of snow. The images seem to tell us that the story we’ve watched has been the death of something and the rebirth of something else. The death we experience is the way of doing life in the Recchi family under the direction of Edoardo Sr. What gets born to take its place, well finding that out is the fun of watching the film.
The phrase “behind closed doors” takes a place of prominence in this story. When somebody enters a room the door is closed behind them, the shades are drawn. When somebody buys something or is given a present it is put away in a drawer somewhere, safe from prying eyes. At first I didn’t think much about the closing doors, it seemed like the usual background action of servants in a story about the filthy rich, but the further I got into the film, the more I started to pay attention to the image of the closed door, the drawn shade. Not only are the Recchis a family that plays things close to the vest, a group of people who keep secrets from one another and the world around them, but they also live very compartmentalized lives. Everything and everyone in the Recchi world has its place and has its purpose. It’s when something is let out of its box or a door is left open that chaos enters into the film. Edoardo starts the changes off, promoting both his son and his grandson to the same position. Suddenly Tancredi’s safe place as the family heir is threatened, Edo is thrust into a position that he’s yet to be groomed for. From this moment forward a domino effect of life changes takes place through the film, and though the grandfather pushes down that first domino, it’s Emma who takes up the slack and keeps the sequence going to its ultimate end.
At one point during that opening birthday celebration Edoardo is given a present by his granddaughter. They have a long-standing tradition where she always draws something for him. When he opens it and instead finds a picture she has taken he is shocked and confused, upset at the breaking of tradition. What Emma is doing in the background of this moment is something that really struck me. As Edoardo unwraps the present Emma snatches up the ribbon and winds it tightly around her hand. It was a nice, subtle way of establishing her position as the family’s caretaker, the one who makes sure everything gets put away where it needs to be. God forbid a little ribbon lay around on their perfectly set dinner table for even a second. All of this changes, however, in a scene where Emma goes to the restaurant where Antonio works and bites into a prawn dish that he has prepared. Lighting, acting, and camera work blend together in stylish perfection to translate the idea of senses being awakened to film. Emma savors the dish, while at the same time ecstatically devouring it. She sits in spotlight, illuminated as the bright shining center of the film, where the people she was having dinner with now sit in darkness. In this one moment Emma’s face transforms from being a blank slate of restraint to a sketchbook of feeling and emotion. She is changed from being the sturdy, reliable matriarch of a family to a passionate, feeling woman who is suddenly very interested in the swarthy young chef Antonio.
If the prawn scene represented a new awakening in Emma’s senses, then a scene in which she accidentally finds a hidden away note written by her daughter Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher), confessing her newfound romantic interest in another woman, is what pushes her from thoughts to action. Contrary to the usual reaction we may get from a mother in a film finding out that her daughter is a lesbian; Emma is not upset at the notion, but rather kind of swept away by the romanticism of it. The camera lingers on Emma’s reaction while reading the letter in much the same way it did as we watched her eat the prawn. Inspired by her daughter’s boldness, it isn’t long before she approaches Antonio and starts an affair with the young chef. The affair changes Emma dramatically as a character. Their first encounter takes place up on a mountain, out in the country where Antonio wishes to open his restaurant. During their sex scene the frame is awash in natural light (a stark contrast from the drawn shades and shadow of the early part of the film), close-ups of flesh are intermingled with nature shots, insects, and wide expanses (in direct opposition to the claustrophobic scenes filmed in the spotless Recchi mansion earlier in the film). Soon her perfectly tailored wardrobe is replaced by casual gardening togs and her perfectly pinned up hair is chopped off at the shoulders, the clippings left to mingle with the dirt. Their affair takes up much of the rising action of the second act, and the changes in Emma and how they conflict with the established familial routine of the Recchi’s is what eventually builds to the film’s climax. There are several scenes in the film where Emma is dutifully undressed. Once by Antonio before he sleeps with her and once by Ida, the loyal housekeeper and door closer of the Recchi family. In both scenes Emma obliges the disrober passive and unmoving, projecting the effect of being more a life-sized doll than a real woman. Emma, of Russian descent, gives a monologue explaining that once she married her husband she changed her name and became, for all intents and purposes, Italian. She is whatever she needs to be to whoever needs her at the moment. It’s no secret that the film is heading towards breaking her out of this subservient stupor, and it comes as no surprise that two of the last images of the film are of Emma frantically dressing herself while the housekeeper can only look on and the front door of the Recchi mansion being left swung open with nobody there to close it behind her. What shouldn’t be given away and what should be left to discovery is how she gets to that point, how exactly does the change in Emma affect each of the characters important to the film, what is the breaking point that finally throws open the doors of the Recchi household, and what are the reactions of the other players on the board.
