Review by Simon Zhou

I Am Love
Dir. Luca Gaudagnino

The film’s title is a bold declaration of unrestrained passion, promising melodrama on an operatic scale - a promise that it sadly does not fulfill. 

Vast in its scope, I Am Love follows three generations of a narcissistically wealthy Italian family the Recchi’s, examining what happens when the matriarch of the family, Emma (Tilda Swinton), chooses to give in to love in the form of an affair. It is a familiar melodramatic conceit, the basic elements of its plot shared by 1940s and 1950s classics of the genre such as Mildred Pierce (dir. Michael Curtiz), and Guadagnino faithfully adorns his film with the requisite melodramatic embellishments, from sweeping strings through to soft focus close-ups of teary-eyed heroines. 

By definition, melodramas operate on a level of heightened and excessive emotion, a joyful celebration of sentimentalism, and when they succeed, they do so because of their force of conviction in the emotions experienced, allowing us to abandon any objections on the grounds of our being sensible and give in to emotion too.

The problem with I Am Love is that while Guadagnino seems to revel in the stylistic artifacts of the melodrama, he never seems comfortable with the extravagances of emotion that a melodrama entails.  At no point in the film did I feel that the director had really, truly invested his heart into it, and in not allowing himself to be vulnerable, the result is a timid film that in no way does justice to its spirited title.

Guadagnino seems to be afraid of bearing the burden of emotional conviction a melodrama requires, choosing to deal with its melodramatic conceits cerebrally rather than emotionally.  The film obediently complies with sweeping orchestral music to signify events that take place on a emotional reckoning rather than a literal one of what is really happening, and there are various flourishes reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni (oblique architectural angles, moving cars), Theo Angelopoulos (steadi-cam long take conversations) and even Jean Luc-Godard (jump cuts! disembodied voice over! cars! jump cuts! ju –p cuts!). 

But the pleasure we might gain from such a brash exercise in style is undermined by the fact that none of this helps to humanise any of its characters, a necessity given the world of ostentatious wealth that is removed from the experience of most.  Guadagnino’s attempts to break down this distance fail, because his decisions are driven by logic rather than emotion, resulting in an experience that is bafflingly boring. 

Watching the film, I had no reason to care about any of its characters on more than a surface level, and the very thoughfulness of the direction at no point substituted for the need for the director’s heart in the film, turning material which is inherently wrought with emotional ripeness, into something resembling a cold wet fish. 

There is a part of me which wonders whether I am missing the point; whether it was the film’s intended effect to totally distance me, whether its archetype as a melodrama, its aesthetic devotion to the melodrama, is simply part of the elaborate design of the film which means to be grounded.  In such a logic, the aesthetics of the film would be to articulate the ostentatiousness of the trappings of wealth, and its final effect – that of distant pity – to reveal the situation of Emma.  Alexis Tioseco (a critic whose most famous work can be read here) once said that the first impulse of the critic is to love.  Indeed, why else would one watch and write about movies? 

I remember when I was still at varsity, I brought home a 1951 Hindi melodrama, Awaara (dir. Raj Kapoor) as part of a paper on Indian cinema.  To my surprise, both my mother and father had seen it in their adolescence, during the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and spoke of it with such fondness that moved me, and watching its unabashedly emotional sequences, I could understand why. No matter what the director’s intentions were with I Am Love, I was unable to love it, and ultimately, that is a disappointment, no matter one how looks at it.

Upon the conclusion of I Am Love’s final scene, most in the audience were laughing, a sure sign that the emotional excesses were too far in excess of what the stakes demanded.  Put simply, the sequence was too ludicrously ‘melodramatic’.  Only it wasn’t.  If the director had been able to fully commit his heart into all the emotions the characters were feeling instead of being afraid of its sentimentality - if he had put his heart into the film, investing it with sincerity and vulnerability, we would’ve been right there with him.  I Am Love is clearly misleading; I Think Love would have been more apt.