I Am Love (Io Sono L'Amore) is an operatic melodrama of sumptuous visual splendor and stirring emotional power. Words like "operatic" and "melodrama" are frequently used in a negative context in most modern film criticism, but this is the sort of picture that brashly eschews accepted notions of what is and what is not thematically and stylistically acceptable. Director Luca Guadagnino's film is a lush piece of cinematic art, a glorious powerhouse of emotion that celebrates, with grandiose verve, the all-consuming force of love, family, and... food.
Ah, food. Great films have a way of reaching out of the screen and pulling the viewer into its unique world, and I Am Love uses food in a way few films ever have. The preparation, the presentation, and -- my heavens -- the taste of various culinary delights becomes not merely a setting around which these characters live and breathe, but a delectable through-line that dictates its own glistening thematic subtext. Food, for these characters, can either bind in perpetual shackles or become a luscious conduit for unknown freedom. The effect could come off feeling cheap or silly, but Guadagnino strikes a fine balance between self-referential bravado and deep, thorough seriousness. Yes, the film knows it is over the top, but in the world of these characters, "over the top" is the norm, and the need and all-consuming desire for love is a matter of life and death, as serious and monumental as foreign wars.
Does that make the film insular? Perhaps from one angle, but I Am Love is an epic of the personal; it reveres matters of the heart higher than all else in its worldview. And as human beings, at the height of our greatest joys, angers, sorrows, and heartbreaks, we do, too. That is why, in spite of all its elaborately-staged formalism and its flamboyant adherence to exterior extravagance, I Am Love is more closely tethered to the humane than one might initially expect. In fact, the film is more in tune with humanity than seven-eights of this year's major releases. It vibrantly and viscerally taps into what makes the heart beat and the soul stir.
The film tells the story of the Recchi family, a clan so deeply rooted within its high-society lifestyle and haute couture culture that they have lost touch with one another and with themselves. Emma (Tilda Swinton, as perfect here as she is perfect in everything) is the matriarch, tightly wound and coldly driven to make every last ostentatious detail of her family's image sparkle. Yet there is a fire laying dormant inside of Emma, one that desperately yearns to be lit. We see the glimmers of it in the slightest crinkle in Emma's lip, the smallest furrow in her brow. Emma was perhaps once more than what she currently presents herself to be, but the pompous presentation of her current persona -- indeed, the basic framework of her very mannered world -- prevent her buried self from rising to the surface.
What does allow Emma's true passion to flourish is a series of events that are only connected through the collective psyche of these colorful characters, among them Edoardo (Gabriele Ferzetti), Emma's stoic business-minded husband; Edo (Flavio Parenti), their dedicated son; Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher), their daughter, who also seems to be suppressing a deep secret; and Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), the family's personal chef and Edo's best friend, with whom Emma becomes embroiled in a passionate affair that enlivens her senses and challenges everything about her current existence.
In form, I Am Love is playing the same pool as some of film's greatest auteurs. The common reference point for melodrama in America is Douglas Sirk, but while its tone is similarly extravagant, this film's influence runs deeper, bleeding together a variety of eras, cultures, sensibilities, and even artforms. There are surely strands of Visconti and Antonioni, and beyond the Italian influences there are flourishes of Truffaut, Bertolucci, Scorsese, even Hitchcock. But in theme and message I Am Love most notably and powerfully resembles Kate Chopin's 1899 controversial literary masterwork The Awakening, in which Edna Pontellier was introduced to the possibility of love, of life, of freedom as a woman, a freedom that sat perpendicular to her life as a Creole wife and mother.
In the same way, Emma Recchi is awakened in both her senses and her spirit, and once her eyes are opened, there is no turning back...the bell cannot be unrung. Edna's awakening led her to a sad and poetic end, a choice that was, in many ways, her only true way to rebel against her oppressive circumstances. Emma lives under the same oppression but in a different world. In a frightening wonderland of epiphanies, her greatest is the discovery of choice. The exterior sheen might lose its glow, the precarious structure of lavish life might crumble, but a heart denied its truth is the most violent and irreparable destruction of all. Emma finds her heart's truth, and once discovered it cannot be denied.
She is love, and so is her film.
