The Sensual Elegance of I Am Love

This fea­ture is the fourth in our sum­mer series, La Dolce Vita: A Cel­e­bra­tion of Ital­ian Screen Style, in part­ner­ship with Disaronno.

For all of the lux­u­ry it dis­plays, the vital­i­ty in I Am Love comes from a more egal­i­tar­i­an source. Direc­tor Luca Guadagni­no sets up a milieu where the ceil­ings are high and the cater­ing costs are high­er, where soup is served from sil­ver tureens and the men are dressed by Fen­di. Then, he spins the mean­ing of these aes­thet­ic choic­es as the force of desire prompts his lead­ing lady to take flight from it all.

Hav­ing devel­oped the film with Guadagni­no for 11 years, Til­da Swin­ton gives her­self over to a sex­u­al awak­en­ing that leaves her char­ac­ter, Emma, per­ma­nent­ly unbut­toned from the cos­tume of a pre­vi­ous­ly well-worn life. Her erot­ic trans­for­ma­tion takes place in a rur­al set­ting, amidst rolling hills, miles (lit­er­al­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly) from the lone­ly, opu­lent rooms that she usu­al­ly occu­pies as a Rec­chio woman. 

Emma is a Russ­ian émi­gré who long ago sub­li­mat­ed her ori­gins (and name) by mar­ry­ing into an aris­to­crat­ic Milanese fam­i­ly. As a wife and moth­er of three, Emma glides through her social and house­hold respon­si­bil­i­ties. She is a warm, self-pos­sessed pres­ence say­ing lit­tle dur­ing the din­ners that mark one occa­sion after anoth­er. Visu­al­ly she looks the part (dressed in Jil Sander by cos­tume design­er Antonel­la Can­narozzi) as she silent­ly basks in her chief plea­sure: food.

Yorick Le Saux’s gold­en-hued cin­e­matog­ra­phy cleaves to the sen­su­al digres­sions hap­pen­ing in plain sight even if they go unno­ticed by a fam­i­ly pre­oc­cu­pied by its mat­ters of the day. At a lunch with her glam­orous moth­er-in-law, Alle­gra (Marisa Beren­son), the con­ver­sa­tion turns to whether Emma’s son Edo will mar­ry his girl­friend. Both Emma and the cam­era are over­come by the inde­cent pink­ness of a plump prawn that has just been deliv­ered to the table. Le Saux’s close-up on Emma as she eats is inti­ma­cy incarnate.This dish has been cooked by Anto­nio (Edoar­do Gab­brielli­ni), a friend of Edo’s. The two young men plan to open a restau­rant togeth­er in San Remo on the Ital­ian Riviera.

From the moment that Emma sees Anto­nio – prep­ping tiny per­fect morsels clad in chef’s whites – some­thing with­in is shocked to life. Swin­ton per­forms a woman ground to a halt by a causal every­day encounter. Sec­onds lat­er, Edo is there, miss­ing the sig­nif­i­cance, miss­ing the rup­ture, because his moth­er is a con­tained per­son whose inte­ri­or rev­e­la­tions do not scan in an envi­ron­ment built for big statements. 

Emma vis­its San Remo, full of unformed hopes, and ends up shoplift­ing a book called Ate­lier Simul­tane about anoth­er Russ­ian émi­gré to France, the artist Sonia Delauney. This book, with its colour-splashed cov­er, is a tal­is­man for all that she is about to expe­ri­ence. Cannarozzi’s cos­tumes veer into a new palette, as oranges and reds clothe Emma’s low­er half. Undress­ing is estab­lished as a motif. 

First­ly, the cam­era spies on Anto­nio peel­ing off jeans in a hid­den cor­ner of a gar­den. Lat­er, he dis­robes Emma, ten­der­ly undo­ing and set­ting aside jew­ellery before mov­ing onto items of cloth­ing. She will nev­er dress the same way again and when they make love out­side wit­nessed by flow­ers and insects, the only cos­tum­ing is nature’s finery.

To find out more about Disaronno’s 500-year anniver­sary* cel­e­bra­tions, vis­it dis​aron​no​.com

*1525: The leg­end of Dis­aron­no begins.