I Am Love (Guadagnino)
Films that just miss the mark can be excruciating to reflect on, and none of the films that I saw this year were as painfully close yet oh-so-far from a masterpiece as Luca Guadagnino’s beautifully monumental misfire, I Am Love. The film looks at an aristocratic Italian family that is transitioning into a new era in pretty much every way: globalizing business, unconventional sexuality, and many others that reside in spoiler territory. Holding it all on her shoulders is the elegant matriarch played expertly by Tilda Swinton, who is just as good here as she was in Julia. She is caught in a struggle between the sense to conserve what her family is founded on, and the call to adapt to all of the natural changes and developments that are surfacing. Much of the film’s strength, besides its technical bravura both in its lensing and its music, is in this pulsating tension and uncertainty that creates such an unbearable iciness in everyone. Something is building, for sure, and it promises greatness.
Then, the development that the film was obviously structured around is revealed, and all of the steam that trapped under the lid simmers away, yielding what feels like a a poorly-made Adrian Lyne film. Everything from the half-point on suffers from a big feeling of ‘ok whatever.’ It’s not that what is occurring is implausible, nor is it deviating from the film’s primary themes, but it’s just all so ordinary compared to the extra-ordinary set-up. And it only gets worse from this point, introducing a last-minute, contrived downer-of-an-event that took my breath away only in its ability to shock me that this project could have sunk so low. I convinced myself after the film that this bit at the end could potentially make sense, but again, it is done in such a cheap, thoughtless way that I wished I had stopped watching an hour earlier. There is a final sequence that re-captures the swift energy that the film’s best moments master, leaving the family in a true disarray, as well as an eerie coda that plays in the middle of the closing credits, leaving a pleasant taste in my mouth that I decided to roll with.