Film Review: Stunning 'I Am Love' is a feast for the senses

Magnolia Pictures

Chef Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) and Tilda Swinton heat up the kitchen in "I Am Love."

I'm calling "I Am Love" the best movie of the year to date; a companion viewer called it "repulsive," in condemnation of the behavior of the lead character played by Tilda Swinton.

Does one opinion invalidate the other? Or can we both be right? "I Am Love" is complex enough to invite such questions, and rich enough -- like many great adult works of art, of which there are too few at the movies -- to resist answers.

The first 24 of the movie's 120 minutes essentially are devoted to one event, a birthday dinner honoring the grandfather who is the patriarch of the Recchis, a wealthy Italian textile- manufacturing family that lives in splendor, among servants and art objects, in a large villa in Milan.

As the minutes ticked by, I kept expecting -- dreading -- that something would break the spell, but writer-director Luca Guadagnino makes not a single false step as he manages the spectacle of the ritualistic dinner arrangements and the more complicated introductions of the large cast of characters. The luminous cinematography by Yorick Le Saux transforms each shot into something exquisite; the wine glasses shine like jewels. (Later in the film, the lighting becomes almost comically expressionistic, as when a plate of prawns with ratatouille seems to bathe a diner within a celestial glow.) The frequently tense musical score, compiled from the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams, adds an element of nervousness to even the most seemingly peaceful pictorial compositions.

The first disruption in Gaudagnino's deceptively leisurely storytelling strategy (the script also credits three other writers) comes with the arrival of Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), an innovative young chef who is bearing a cake for the party but is too shy to enter the house. Antonio is the best friend of handsome Edoardo Recchi (Flavio Parenti), the high-spirited grandson who is given control of the family business alongside his stern-faced father, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono). Viewers might wonder if Edoardo, who is engaged to the beautiful Eva (Diane Fleri), feels more than friendship for Antonio, and if it's this hidden emotion that is the story's true motivation.

Redolent of Shakespeare and the films of that specialist in wealthy decadence, Italy's Luchino Visconti, the story's setup gives way to swooning -- arguably even grotesque -- melodrama when Edoardo's mother, Emma (Tilda Swinton), "rescued" from Russia in her youth by her marriage to Tancredi, becomes obsessed with Antonio. Guadagnino finally stumbles when the two consummate their affair, their au naturel coupling taking place in nature itself, among closeups of Lepidopteran proboscises and insect-caressed stamens.

Imperfect humanity seems oddly unattractive compared to the architecture, the fabrics and especially the food, which is prepared by Antonio with the devotion of a lover, no matter who is at the table. Is that Guadagnino's point? In any case, the affair leads to tragedy -- and, perhaps, liberation, at an incredible cost. (Thus, the idea that Emma's decision-making is selfishly "repulsive," as signaled by the heavy- breathing self-absorption of the film's title.)

At a bookshop, Emma -- whose signature dish is a Russian fish stew called ukha, a symbol of her humble origins -- accidentally steals a volume about simultanéisme, an art theory that suggests that placing one design next to another affects the appearance of both, the way the eye "mixes" the pigment to form a new color when primary colors are placed next to each other in a pointilist painting. At a climactic party, Emma wears an outfit inspired by a "simultaneous" painting by the early 20th-century French artist Robert Delaunay; perhaps Guadagnino is trying to suggest that identity is shaped and colored by the circumstances that surround it and can't be defined by legal, religious or ethical absolutes.

In English, Italian and -- briefly -- Russian, "I Am Love" is exclusively at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394

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