I Am Love (Guadagnino 2010)

Much has been said about Tilda Swinton and a certain dish of prawns, depicted at the turning point of I Am Love, as "the most erotic sex of the year." She does indeed look ravished while digging into said prawns -- the point, of course, is that the hands that made such prawns were hands that understood the earth, its rhythms, its bounty, and thus understood our dear blonde Tilda, here named Emma.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I Am Love is an opus. It's luscious; it makes you yearn for the effortlessness grace of those who have long lived with wealth. But like most art, it exposes the ruin beneath. Our Emma is Russian, rescued from her future by a second-generation Milano textile manufacturer, obsessed with rare and exquisite art. The idea, of course, is that Emma is one of these pieces, and he collects her porcelain visage, carts her back to Milan, renames her Emma (at one point she admits 'I don't even remember my real name') and appoints her matriarch-in-training. She gives birth to three gorgeous Italian babies; she learns Italian; she acquires grace along with a well-tailored wardrobe of Fendi. We do not witness this history, but are made to understand it.

In lieu of backstory, we are given extended milieu. The film begins with an exquisite meal for the aging true patriarch of the family -- Emma's husband's father, to be clear -- hosted by Emma in the family's truly sumptuous home. It is a gathering of beauty: patriarch and matriarch aging the way only the wealthy can, amazing slanting light filling the snow-bound home, an army of quiet servants, fine-boned Italians speaking every word like they're making love. The camerawork is patient and lingering; as in Ozu, the camera oftentimes leaves the actions and examines the rest of the space and home, like a lost guest, hungry to know what secrets the spaces speak. The score, again like Ozu, is a life form unto itself, serving as a dynamic, pulsing bridge between scenes, its urgency a reminder of something building, near-bursting.

That thing, we realize very early on, is dear Emma. And she does so with stunning hunger; a thing to behold. After the quietly passive-aggressive and extended dinner, there are plot points that follow: a slighted son, innocence lost, the inevitable prawns, the equally inevitable preparer of the prawns. Hair is shorn, secrets are deduced, tragedy ensues. A scene that should, be all rights, earn the film a NC-17, would even make the likes of Slothy blush, jump-cutting, as it does, between flora, fauna, and cunnilingus. In the heat of a Italian summer, en plein air, one fears for Tilda's fair skin. Our heroine's choice of fate - and the depiction of that decision -- will divide audiences, but I can say little more. I love Anthony Lane's understanding of the film as 'the type towards which Swinton has been tending': it's a culmination of nervous energy and artistic precision.

This film made me hungry, and not just for prawns.

Shit! Blondie forgot she's supposed to give arbitrary grades to the things she reviews. And so: A-.

Koko: Your comments on the Ozu-like camerawork remind me of a study on asperger's syndrome. Clinicians wired a volunteer with instruments in order to track his eye movement and record his brain function while he watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? What they discovered looks a lot like your secret spaces: the patient, unable to read a scene's emotional cues, would instead scan the room for other potentially useful bits of information: a weathered box spring, a bed in disarray, uneaten prawns. From these details he would build an analogue narrative to compensate for the block on his powers to process such cues. His perspective on human relationships was object-centered and space-seeking, a poetics of environment. Anyway, a familiar notion.

Blondie: Fascinating, especially as Ozu very well may have suffered from Asperger's, or at least some sort of debilitating neuroses, himself. Much like Barthes, he lived with his mother until her death; he then up and died only a few months later. Spent his life meditating on families when he himself had never had a wife or children, let alone a girlfriend. Which isn't to say that loving your mom is a symptom of Asperger's, but coupled with that attention to space (and the fact that he basically made the same movie 28 times), well, maybe.

Slothrop: Slothy was working under the presumption that all movies about the rich are filled not with grace but with delusion unless "grace" is the first conceit to go––think Buñuel. Am I wrong?