I Am Love

I AM LOVE

Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Runtime: 120 min.

TILDA SWINTON IS this era’s genderfuck archetype: Tall with strong cheekbones and ample breasts, she’s also androgynous enough to represent both feminist and gay issues. That’s the essence of her commanding Italian-, Russian-, English-speaking role as I Am Love’s rulebreaking matriarch.

As an émigré in an aristocratic Italian business dynasty who discovers herself through an illicit relationship with a younger lover, Swinton’s Emma (as in Bovary) enjoys, then queers, the pleasures of the European hoi polloi. Luxurious villas, couture wardrobe, fine dining and art heritage raise her appetites and draw her into sex with her son’s best friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a lowborn, social-climbing athlete and chef half her age. This is such a schema of sexual politics that impressionable viewers may think I Am Love is revolutionary, but they ought to know the advances that preceded it and Swinton.

I Am Love screened the same evening I coincidentally caught the 1959 Room at the Top, in which Simone Signoret played a thirtyish French immigrant having an affair with a younger social-climbing Brit (played by Laurence Harvey). While Signoret was the mid-20th-century’s axiom for cinematic sensuality (winning an Oscar to confirm it), Swinton’s many cross-cultural avant-garde art movies suggest she might be an axiom for our contemporary sexual anxiety.

I Am Love repeats the sexual politics of Swinton’s 2002 American film The Deep End (a poor remake of Max Ophuls’ superb 1949 The Reckless Moment) where a middle-class but fearless mother defied gangsters and risked jail to protect her gay son. I Am Love remakes several European classics as it casts a skeptical eye on Emma’s inherited luxuries and glides over the high-life from Milano to San Remo to London until its first strong moment: When Emma caresses her lesbian daughter’s cheek in response to the girl’s coming-out. The need to accept one’s sexual nature is this film’s basic theme; its panoply of advantages, privilege and longing merely lead to Emma’s liberation.

While Room at the Top questioned the hypocrisy of social climbing, I Am Love takes on sexual repression as the only impediment to personal truth and emotional honesty. As muse for this lofty message, Swinton uses her unique artworld status to critique upper class habits (imagine if Grace Kelly strutted leftist sympathies), yet not the full range of ambition and privilege. The film’s young chef is barely sketched; he just likes cooking and sex. Curiously, his acquisitive character and the fact that in sophisticated circles his “gifts” can easily be had goes ignored.

Swinton’s collaboration with director Luca Guadagnino lacks the emotional authenticity that films like Room at the Top once brought to studies of class. Guadagnino’s high-art narrative trick— visual symbols, digressions, photographing food like jewels and an al fresco sex scene that intercuts insects, sunlight, flowers and imperfect flesh—evokes the swanky decadence of Joseph Losey movies but without the dramatic discipline. Guadagnino’s swollen narrative pretends to scrutinize upper-class weakness as Luchino Visconti did in The Innocent and Senso. But Visconti’s masterpieces showed a gay male artist making full emotional identification with all his characters. Those period-set stories still have contemporary political relevance. When Marisa Berenson brings her Barry Lyndon hauteur to the role of Emma’s sister-in-law confidante, however, it confirms that Guadagnino employs too much irony. And Swinton’s post-modern, cheekbone chic exposes the film’s conceit. Her stark, iconic Feminism lacks the richness of Signoret’s courageous lushness. In Room at the Top, Signoret’s pre-feminist assertion, “I own my body and am not ashamed of it!” still feels more advanced than Emma/Swinton’s feigned timidity.

I’ve often admired Swinton’s artsy-gutsy ambition and, though her performance here controls the theatricality from Erick Zonca’s Julia and avoids her pathos in Benjamin Button, it doesn’t match her brilliance in Derek Jarman’s movies or in Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death. About the latter, Pauline Kael admitted to me that Swinton was “lovely like the young Deborah Kerr.” In I Am Love, Swinton’s art-stunt only recalls how much deeper and fuller female characterizations like Kerr’s and Signoret’s used to be. Swinton always attempts bold milestones, but I Am Love makes one long to go back to the old landmarks.

A new-millennium soap opera, I Am Love confuses privilege with courage—probably because it also plays out Swinton’s personal confusions. John Adams’ serial-music score exalts Emma’s freedom with heraldic bombast over images of her hurried self-emancipation. It’s a tour-de-force moment, cannier than the sentimental music cues of The Hours yet no less artificial. Against the truth of upperclass amorality that Visconti and Ophuls understood, this film proposes that Emma must give up pleasures she’s accustomed to—including motherly obligation—to go screw in a cave with a poor boy who looks like one of those Michael Lucas porn urchins. I Am Love is gay/feminist confusion run amok.