Seventh in the Short Responses To Things You Must See Series
Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love [2010] is the story of a family that has its settled ways, comfortable in affluence. Along comes an outsider–an interloper, essentially–whose personality and passion ignite changes in the status quo, leading to tragedy or a shakedown of perfectly preserved pretense. But of course love endures.
Guadagnino’s hypnotic film, however, shows how cinematic art can be made: through a thorough knowledge of the vocabulary of cinema, the elements keenly manipulated to advance–in visual and narrative terms–this story of a Russian woman married to the patriarch of a rich Milanese family, who finds passion and a dream of escape from the stifling contours of her rigidly ordered life in a young chef, the best friend of her son. We somehow know this film will end in tragedy, but even given that, Guadagnino keeps us guessing with every passing scene, so much so that when the tragic finally strikes, it comes out of nowhere, striking us dumb with its brutality and suddenness. This is a beautifully made film, gorgeously shot, and captures the Italian landscape in a washed out but also paradoxically deeply colorful terrible beauty. It is so nuanced and so sure of its every cinematic intentions, and so loving of its influences that include Michaelangelo Antonioni and Alfred Hitchcock and Sally Potter. The key to its success, aside from Tilda Swinton’s unbelievable performance as Emma, is the way Guadagnino handles his camera: he uses it as a caress, as a stalking presence, as a detached observer of high society life, as a microscope lens, as a swooping roller coaster that underlines what is not said–desire, fear, anger, sadness, joy, pain. It is all about the visual choices that make something a masterpiece of an artist who knows what he is going for: in the delicate but also sudden seduction scene between Antonio and Emma in the mountains, for example, we observe Emma taking in the view with a measure of nonchalance dipped in excitement–and then suddenly, we hear a soft crackling sound from behind her, the camera goes out of focus, and in that blurry vision that approximates desire and giving in, we see their obscure figures kissing hungrily. That cinematographic choice felt right, and underlined some more the consummate artistry that this film is made of. Every detail is not wasted and means something–the ukha soup, the seating plan for every meticulously prepared dinner, the ritual of taking off clothes and jewelry, the daughter’s lesbianism, the pool made of sharply angled marble, the housekeeper’s emotional connection with the family, the book that must remain hidden, the names that can’t be recalled, the fact that she has been named Emma by her husband who tells her, “You don’t exist”–all these disparate things mean something, and contribute to such throbbing organic whole. In the middle of all these is the incandescent performance of Tilda Swinton, a Scottish actress playing a trapped Russian woman living in Milan and speaks perfect Italian with a Russian accent. That technicality alone, equal to the chameleon-like power of Meryl Streep, amazes me. That Ms. Swinton is able to marshall all of that to a subtle and also devastating performance is a thing of beauty. Every muscle in her, as she does her craft, shouts sheer believability. This is such a sensual film, a work of art in every way. Set side-by-side with the merely passable, mediocrity suddenly seems almost criminal.
Here is an uproarious and original comedy that stars one of Hollywood’s genuine funnymen (Jim Carrey) and one of cinema’s genuine chameleons (Ewan McGregor). Here is a movie that expands the notion of fact being so much weirder and more fantastic than fiction. Here is a movie that a lot of critics loved. But whatever happened to Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s I Love You Philip Morris [2010]? It’s Oscar-bait material, but in this season of awards and top-ten lists, it’s not being mentioned as a contender. Mr. Carrey is glorious here, and Mr. McGregor is something else. Already though, the film has had a checkered history: it meandered its way to theaters for months and months, but finally did not find an audience, given the haphazard way it has been handled by its distributors. (Nobody wanted to pick it up.) You have to ask: what went wrong? The marketing? The belated distribution? Or perhaps even homophobia? Perhaps. This is after all the story of the real-life Steve Russell, a gay man and a relentlessly inventive con man whose run-ins with the law have become quite legendary–all of them a result of pursuing the love of his life, Philip Morris, a sweet-natured and blonde Southern boy he meets in prison, while serving a jail sentence for fraud. In a life rife with lies and shape-shifting (manifested as metaphor through moving clouds, a recurring motif in the film), Russell–an ex-cop and former Bible-swearing family man–has impersonated lawyers and CFOs and doctors and what-have-you’s, and has even faked his own death by AIDS. Underneath all that is a fool for love, the only truth he has come to admit, near the end of the film. This is an extraordinary film of an extraordinary life. It is also relentlessly funny and both Carrey and McGregor deserve accolades for their chemistry and for making us believe that all these lies are the makings of magic. Too bad it is not receiving the kind of attention it deserves.
