A disappointment, but an interesting one. Guadagnino’s lush portrait (Io sono l’amore) of a woman imprisoned by bourgeois expectations has, in its evocation of other Italian cinematic families of wealth (the Finzi-Continis, for instance), ambitions toward the heft of similar domestic epics, but is let down by the hackneyed plot. The film begins with the cold formality of a mansion in Milan — suitably, it is the dead of winter — and the chilly grandeur of Tilda Swinton, who plays Emma, the woman of the house. We discover she’s Russian, the outsider meant to conform to the Italian industrial-magnate family (the Recchis) into which she has married. Out of unhappiness — or rather, her belated discovery that she, surrounded by her pearls and servants and Jil Sander dresses, is nonetheless unhappy — she embarks upon an affair, which, for lack of a better term, thaws and reawakens her. There’s a scene of lovemaking filmed with Seventies shamelessness, with close-ups of (as in the Roy Ayers song) “bees and things and flowers,” the glory of the natural world rousing itself up from hibernation, in sympathy with Emma’s own rapture. But it provokes titters from the audience instead, their cavorting reminiscent of the line drawings of hirsute hippies from “The Joy of Sex.” But Swinton, as always, is unerringly magnificent; watch it, at least, for her orgasmic encounter with a prawn, and the ensuing beatific light that shines upon her face.
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