I Am Love (2010)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Emma has left Russia to live with her husband in Italy. Now a member of a powerful industrial family, she is the respected mother of three, but feels unfulfilled. One day, Antonio, a talented chef and her son's friend, makes her senses kindle.
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19 films that influenced I Am Love
What critics say influenced I Am Love
The opening act of Luca Guadagnino's film establishes the stature of the Recchi family as surely as the Corleones are established in “ The Godfather ,” or the Salinas in Visconti's “ The Leopard .”
A glorious epic that feels a little bit like Luchino Visconti 's The Leopard by way of Paul Thomas Anderson 's Magnolia , I Am Love is a truly great film that offers substance at the heart of the season's spectacle.
However, it really is the cinema of Luchino Visconti that is most recognisable as one of Guadagnino’s influences, especially The Leopard .
He's also clearly inspired by such classic meditations on the Italian bourgeoisie and passing of epochs as "The Leopard" and "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis."
It seems impossible to avoid comparing I Am Love to Lucino Visconti's The Leopard , even though the two films have very little in common besides a wealthy old family being destroyed by personal crises; yet while that film carefully frames its melodrama in a wide-ranging historical context, I Am Love makes no pretensions to context or society, despite its very deliberate chronological placement.
Visconti is more to the point, since I Am Love inescapably recalls The Leopard (1963) set in modern times.
If there are traces of Visconti here, they refer not to “The Damned,” which belabored a grand and screwed-up family as it slid into the clutches of Nazism, but to an earlier, more pitying film like “Rocco and His Brothers,” in which lust chewed up another family in a doomy Milan.
Check out Luchino Visconti’s own 1969 classic “The Damned” if you’d like to see an aristocratic European family with closets full of genuinely terrifying skeletons.
So he has the sense of film history and about 10 minutes into it, I’m saying, my God, this is Visconti’s “The Damned.”
I Am Love's stately visual style is dense with allusions to other movies: Visconti's Senso , De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , and even Hitchcock's Vertigo , which is quoted in the spiral-shaped bun Emma wears in her hair.
If there are traces of Visconti here, they refer not to “The Damned,” which belabored a grand and screwed-up family as it slid into the clutches of Nazism, but to an earlier, more pitying film like “Rocco and His Brothers,” in which lust chewed up another family in a doomy Milan.
I Am Love's stately visual style is dense with allusions to other movies: Visconti's Senso , De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , and even Hitchcock's Vertigo , which is quoted in the spiral-shaped bun Emma wears in her hair.
He's also clearly inspired by such classic meditations on the Italian bourgeoisie and passing of epochs as "The Leopard" and "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis."
In fact, the love scenes appear to deliberately recall moments from that film and from Russell’s Savage Messiah (1972)—to the degree that I’d be hard-pressed to believe Guadagnino was unfamiliar with them.
It has a lyrical, natural, non-air-brushed sensuality to it that I haven’t seen in film since Ken Russell brought Women in Love to the screen in 1969.
But what truly galvanizes the images (beyond their triggering memories of our love affairs with The Conformist or Vertigo) is the “score,” a tailored pastiche of extant Adams compositions that includes music from Nixon in China.
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Emma and Antonio in which she wears the Kim Novak Vertigo knot in her hair.
But what truly galvanizes the images (beyond their triggering memories of our love affairs with The Conformist or Vertigo) is the “score,” a tailored pastiche of extant Adams compositions that includes music from Nixon in China.
I Am Love's stately visual style is dense with allusions to other movies: Visconti's Senso , De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , and even Hitchcock's Vertigo , which is quoted in the spiral-shaped bun Emma wears in her hair.
As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino 's visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they finished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs.
Italian cinema has come a long way from Marco Bellocchio’s Devil in the Flesh (1986), in which a couple engaging in graphic sex discuss the Bolshevik Revolution, to Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, in which a couple engaging in graphic sex discuss how to make fish soup.
It’s also nice to see Marisa Berenson of Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” among others, as Emma’s chic mother-in-law.
And Marisa Berenson, of course, was in Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon.”
From her work with Derek Jarman (Edward II) and Sally Potter (gender-bending Orlando) in the early 1990s to last year’s career-best work in Erick Zonka’s Julia, she has proved to be an enigmatic muse for directors of the arthouse and mainstream.
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And if you don’t know Gabriele Ferzetti, it’s – if you’ve seen “Once Upon A Time in the West,” he’s the guy on the crutches when Henry Fonda kicks the crutches out from under him.
At the same time, it’s a story about the passing of an era, with the nouveau-riche family’s textile business falling prey to modern times and the dying family patriarch (Gabriele Ferzetti, Once Upon a Time in the West) opting to leave everything in the hands of both Tancredi and Edoardo, who have very different ideas of what the business was, is and should be.
She is irradiated with a dangerous joy—a gourmet’s parody of Mary at the Annunciation, perhaps, though I couldn’t help remembering the end of “Kiss Me Deadly,” when another curious blonde opens a box with something nuclear inside, and gets a faceful of light.