This feature is the fourth in our summer series, La Dolce Vita: A Celebration of Italian Screen Style, in partnership with Disaronno.
For all of the luxury it displays, the vitality in I Am Love comes from a more egalitarian source. Director Luca Guadagnino sets up a milieu where the ceilings are high and the catering costs are higher, where soup is served from silver tureens and the men are dressed by Fendi. Then, he spins the meaning of these aesthetic choices as the force of desire prompts his leading lady to take flight from it all.
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Having developed the film with Guadagnino for 11 years, Tilda Swinton gives herself over to a sexual awakening that leaves her character, Emma, permanently unbuttoned from the costume of a previously well-worn life. Her erotic transformation takes place in a rural setting, amidst rolling hills, miles (literally and spiritually) from the lonely, opulent rooms that she usually occupies as a Recchio woman.
Emma is a Russian émigré who long ago sublimated her origins (and name) by marrying into an aristocratic Milanese family. As a wife and mother of three, Emma glides through her social and household responsibilities. She is a warm, self-possessed presence saying little during the dinners that mark one occasion after another. Visually she looks the part (dressed in Jil Sander by costume designer Antonella Cannarozzi) as she silently basks in her chief pleasure: food.
Yorick Le Saux’s golden-hued cinematography cleaves to the sensual digressions happening in plain sight even if they go unnoticed by a family preoccupied by its matters of the day. At a lunch with her glamorous mother-in-law, Allegra (Marisa Berenson), the conversation turns to whether Emma’s son Edo will marry his girlfriend. Both Emma and the camera are overcome by the indecent pinkness of a plump prawn that has just been delivered to the table. Le Saux’s close-up on Emma as she eats is intimacy incarnate.This dish has been cooked by Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a friend of Edo’s. The two young men plan to open a restaurant together in San Remo on the Italian Riviera.
From the moment that Emma sees Antonio – prepping tiny perfect morsels clad in chef’s whites – something within is shocked to life. Swinton performs a woman ground to a halt by a causal everyday encounter. Seconds later, Edo is there, missing the significance, missing the rupture, because his mother is a contained person whose interior revelations do not scan in an environment built for big statements.
Emma visits San Remo, full of unformed hopes, and ends up shoplifting a book called Atelier Simultane about another Russian émigré to France, the artist Sonia Delauney. This book, with its colour-splashed cover, is a talisman for all that she is about to experience. Cannarozzi’s costumes veer into a new palette, as oranges and reds clothe Emma’s lower half. Undressing is established as a motif.
Firstly, the camera spies on Antonio peeling off jeans in a hidden corner of a garden. Later, he disrobes Emma, tenderly undoing and setting aside jewellery before moving onto items of clothing. She will never dress the same way again and when they make love outside witnessed by flowers and insects, the only costuming is nature’s finery.
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*1525: The legend of Disaronno begins.
