I Am Corny
I went to see I Am Love last night, the new Italian film starring Tilda Swinton, directed by Luca Guadagnino. It’s been getting great reviews; the cinematography is lush, the John Adams score even more so and Swinton is great at repressed anguish; the storyline is of the rich-alienated-wife-meets-sexy-young-baker-has-affair-and-destroys-family variety.
The ghosts of great directors like Visconti and Antonioni have been wheeled out as influences but the comparisons are lazy. What these earlier directors achieved – and repeatedly – was, at its best, brutal, brilliantly nuanced analyses of the complex intertwining of family and politics, money and tradition. I Am Love, on the other hand, and quite despite its arthouse credentials (it’s got subtitles and Tilda Swinton) reiterates every cliché about sex, class and tradition in the book. It’s a great example of the new breed of films I like to call faux-indie – films that pretend to be doing something radical but that are, in fact, as conservative as they come. (_Up in the Air_, and Juno are prime examples – hey, I never knew that Big Business could be soulless! That family is great! That being alone is sad! That teenage pregnancy is cool if you’re perky! I mean, thanks for that!! )
OK, a quick checklist of the clichés in I Am Love, a story that, despite its lovely surface, is so stale I don’t see how anyone could be surprised that it all crumbles at the end.
1) We meet a seemingly beautiful woman who has a pretty great life and nice kids. Oh, one is gay. But she’s cool about it! She is also nice to servants. Husband doesn’t say much, but then neither does she. However, as she’s really rich, beautiful, has a lovely family and lives in a truly amazing house in Italy we should assume she’s miserable. We are right.
2) Woman’s husband, being rich, is, by implication, a brute although on the whole he seems to behave perfectly decently so I couldn’t work out what he did wrong apart from call her Emma instead of her Russian name Kitiesh (spelling?), which surely she could have put her foot down about early on in their relationship – but then putting one’s foot down is never really proffered up as an option in this film. The script is very sparse – no-one really talks, but unlike the rich, pregnant silences of, say, Antonioni’s films, here the void felt like more silence of the I-have-nothing-to-say variety (once again, a reiteration of the fine line between minimalism and emptiness).
3) Note names: Husband is called Tancredi – the name of the wayward Prince in Lampedusa’s The Leopard, in a not-so-sly nod to Visconti. The name he calls his wife is Emma. Hard not to think of Bovary, that other famously adulterous wife. Not exactly clichés, granted, but not exactly original, either.
4) Emma/Kitiesh finds sexual fulfilment with her son’s best friend, who is a monosyllabic cook (ie, prefers textures and taste to speech; ergo, sensual), who lives in the hills surrounded by nature (_i.e_., sort of sexy, like an animal).
5) Compassionate capitalist/wise man is a Hindu, ergo more naturally ‘spiritual’ than your-run-of-the-mill Italian.
6) At the beginning of the film, Emma/Kitiesh is emotionally lost, so it’s winter – everything is frozen. When she and sexy cook discover each other, it’s spring (cue close-up of bugs on flowers etc). When her son dies, it rains. Get it?
7) Plot spoiler warning! Son discovers mother is sleeping with best friend, gets jealous, shouts a bit at her for whoring, falls in swimming pool, bangs head and dies. Thus, if mother hadn’t strayed, son would still be alive. It’s really only a hair-breadth-away from Iranian cleric blaming earthquakes on loose women. Is that an old story or what?
8) When Emma/Kitiesh decides to leave family – in the most hyperbolic finale to a film I have ever seen – weeping servant packs her bags in a manner not unlike a tornado organising haysheds and helps her change from her fancy dress into something more comfortable – ie, she has literally slipped into something more comfortable. Cue, lots of silences, then Emma/Kitiesh leaves family without a word, but to fill up the emptiness John Adams lets loose with some pretty major sounds (which I enjoyed). The end.
This is the film that has garnered really great reviews. I agree, it looks great, the performances are convincing and the music is wonderful. The only problem was, it needed a script. And an idea not saturated in sepia. Faux-indie. Showing now, in a cinema near you. (Oh – don’t get me started on Kick Ass.)
I went to see I Am Love last night, the new Italian film starring Tilda Swinton, directed by Luca Guadagnino. It’s been getting great reviews; the cinematography is lush, the John Adams score even more so and Swinton is great at repressed anguish; the storyline is of the rich-alienated-wife-meets-sexy-young-baker-has-affair-and-destroys-family variety.
The ghosts of great directors like Visconti and Antonioni have been wheeled out as influences but the comparisons are lazy. What these earlier directors achieved – and repeatedly – was, at its best, brutal, brilliantly nuanced analyses of the complex intertwining of family and politics, money and tradition. I Am Love, on the other hand, and quite despite its arthouse credentials (it’s got subtitles and Tilda Swinton) reiterates every cliché about sex, class and tradition in the book. It’s a great example of the new breed of films I like to call faux-indie – films that pretend to be doing something radical but that are, in fact, as conservative as they come. (_Up in the Air_, and Juno are prime examples – hey, I never knew that Big Business could be soulless! That family is great! That being alone is sad! That teenage pregnancy is cool if you’re perky! I mean, thanks for that!! )
OK, a quick checklist of the clichés in I Am Love, a story that, despite its lovely surface, is so stale I don’t see how anyone could be surprised that it all crumbles at the end.
1) We meet a seemingly beautiful woman who has a pretty great life and nice kids. Oh, one is gay. But she’s cool about it! She is also nice to servants. Husband doesn’t say much, but then neither does she. However, as she’s really rich, beautiful, has a lovely family and lives in a truly amazing house in Italy we should assume she’s miserable. We are right.
2) Woman’s husband, being rich, is, by implication, a brute although on the whole he seems to behave perfectly decently so I couldn’t work out what he did wrong apart from call her Emma instead of her Russian name Kitiesh (spelling?), which surely she could have put her foot down about early on in their relationship – but then putting one’s foot down is never really proffered up as an option in this film. The script is very sparse – no-one really talks, but unlike the rich, pregnant silences of, say, Antonioni’s films, here the void felt like more silence of the I-have-nothing-to-say variety (once again, a reiteration of the fine line between minimalism and emptiness).
3) Note names: Husband is called Tancredi – the name of the wayward Prince in Lampedusa’s The Leopard, in a not-so-sly nod to Visconti. The name he calls his wife is Emma. Hard not to think of Bovary, that other famously adulterous wife. Not exactly clichés, granted, but not exactly original, either.
4) Emma/Kitiesh finds sexual fulfilment with her son’s best friend, who is a monosyllabic cook (ie, prefers textures and taste to speech; ergo, sensual), who lives in the hills surrounded by nature (_i.e_., sort of sexy, like an animal).
5) Compassionate capitalist/wise man is a Hindu, ergo more naturally ‘spiritual’ than your-run-of-the-mill Italian.
6) At the beginning of the film, Emma/Kitiesh is emotionally lost, so it’s winter – everything is frozen. When she and sexy cook discover each other, it’s spring (cue close-up of bugs on flowers etc). When her son dies, it rains. Get it?
7) Plot spoiler warning! Son discovers mother is sleeping with best friend, gets jealous, shouts a bit at her for whoring, falls in swimming pool, bangs head and dies. Thus, if mother hadn’t strayed, son would still be alive. It’s really only a hair-breadth-away from Iranian cleric blaming earthquakes on loose women. Is that an old story or what?
8) When Emma/Kitiesh decides to leave family – in the most hyperbolic finale to a film I have ever seen – weeping servant packs her bags in a manner not unlike a tornado organising haysheds and helps her change from her fancy dress into something more comfortable – ie, she has literally slipped into something more comfortable. Cue, lots of silences, then Emma/Kitiesh leaves family without a word, but to fill up the emptiness John Adams lets loose with some pretty major sounds (which I enjoyed). The end.
This is the film that has garnered really great reviews. I agree, it looks great, the performances are convincing and the music is wonderful. The only problem was, it needed a script. And an idea not saturated in sepia. Faux-indie. Showing now, in a cinema near you. (Oh – don’t get me started on Kick Ass.)
