Review of I Am Love (2010) by William D — 22 Jul 2010

"I Am Love," an Italian film from relatively unknown writer/director Luca Guadagnino and starring an Italian-speaking Tilda Swinton, is a mediocre, dull, television-level melodrama tarted up with gorgeous cinematography and art direction. It certainly looks great, but there's nothing there.

Yet another example of a great cinematographer being talked into directing films because so many people don't know the difference between cinematography and direction. Guadagnino is amazingly gifted with a camera, but he has no sense of how to develop a story or tell it. He also has no idea how to use an editing machine or what editing is meant to accomplish.

The interminable "I Am Love" focuses on a super-rich family in Milan. (I suspect that Guadagnino's real reason for doing this project was that he wanted to film in palatial Milanese homes, which he certainly does plenty of. No one loves elegant furnishings like Guadagnino,) Tilda Swinton plays the reasonably happy wife of a middle-aged man who is in line to inherit his father's industrial empire.

All is right in her world until she meets a handsome chef from the lower classes. You can almost see Guadagnino's notes in the screenplay: "Their eyes meet, and her pulse quickens. She has never felt such a longing." The story is saturated in cliches. Sometimes a cliche melodrama told well can be satisfying. (See almost any of the recent films by Clint Eastwood, for example.) But not only is "I Am Love" atrociously hackneyed, it's also sleep-inducing.