***½/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Pippo Delbono, Alba Rohrwacher
written and directed by Luca Guadagnino
by Alex Jackson What to make of the ending to Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love? It's not that it's inexplicable, exactly. I believe I understood what "happened" perfectly well. The issue, really, is with John Adams's score. It builds and builds and grows louder and louder until we half believe that wealthy Milan housewife Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton) will be dragged down to Hell by a gypsy curse. The audience I saw it with struggled to stifle giggles. They were emotionally manipulated to have a strong visceral response, but nothing within the film warranted it. It was an orgasm by prostate massage–pure meaningless reflex. What can you do but giggle? For years, Emma's existence has consisted of a quiet but comfortable series of rituals. Confronted with the knowledge that her daughter Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher) has fallen in love with another woman while away at college and is now a moderately radicalized lesbian, she realizes how empty her life has become. Her son, Eduardo Jr. (Gabriele Ferzetti), is having a similar crisis. He's being groomed to take over the family business, but he'd rather open a restaurant with his chef friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini). When Emma tries one of Antonio's creations, she finds herself sensually overwhelmed. The two begin an intense love affair, culminating in perhaps one of the most pretentious sex scenes ever committed to film. Early reviews of I Am Love place it in the tradition of Douglas Sirk. I see it as more Luis Buñuel masquerading as Ingmar Bergman. That's similar to Sirk, I suppose, but quite a bit more savage. It suggests tragedy elevated beyond melodrama into the realm of absurdist surrealism. I Am Love is filled with lingering shots of furniture, artwork, and food preparation. Guadagnino is establishing a world where our emotional connection to objects is more powerful than our connection to each other–and there's a thin line between that and the French landmark porn in Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty. Guadagnino keeps pushing us and pushing us until our identification with the Recchis completely runs out. These people are Martians. The trap they're in isn't tragic, it's ridiculous. Just as ridiculous, perhaps, is their hopelessly bourgeois escape from it: college lesbianism; the restaurant business; and sexual escapades with the working class. By the time Adams's score peaks, we can no longer pretend this is a serious film. Our alienation from the material has come to a head.
