Io sono L'Amore

I'm awake at 1.15am trying to think of how to explain how I felt about I am Love ( (Io Sono L'Amore). I could recount the narrative, which acutely displays the damaging affect of a passionate love affair on Emma and her family, but strangely enough that would only be telling half the story. I was trying to explain the films impact on me to a young woman in a coffee shop after I'd left the Kino Cinema and I spent most of the time using non-verbal language and hand gesticulations, much to my own surprise; so I figured that this film worked on me as a real affect or bodily level.

There is more than a nod to Hitchcock in the film when Emma (Tilda Swinton) is filmed from behind with her hair made up into a spiral shape ~ both Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Vertigo (1958) and Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954) wore their hair in this way. The spiral was a motif in Hitchcock's films to denote sexual desire or the loss of self-control and this certainly occurs in I am Love. Strangely enough, it is at the height of Emma's passion that she cuts her hair short (indeed, mirroring the hairstyle of her daughter who has just come out as lesbian).

Apart from the persistent scenes of the inside of the immense Ricchi mansion, there is an extended scene in the middle of the film of close-ups of insects on plants, juxtaposed with the lovemaking of Emma and the young chef Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) in the countryside and fragmented abstract images of their bodily parts. Since insects are carriers of pollen and disease and are associated with debris and decay, I read this scene ~ as not only homage to nature ~ the naturalness of sexual attraction, but also dire warning of possible infection or death, which occurs twice in the Ricchi family. Firstly, the death of her grandfather which signals the beginning of the demise of the Ricchi family business and then the sudden death of her son Edoardo (Flavio Parenti) when he accidentally hits his head on the side of the swimming pool after trying to escape her explanation of why she had become involved with Antonio.

A cold aesthetic pervades the film from the first scene of a Milan snow scape to the austere interiors of the Ricchi house. This is an interesting film, which culminated for me in the final dramatic scene after Edoardo's funeral in which the relationships of all the characters (but primarily the women) are highlighted by music that builds to a loud brass crescendo and dialogue between them that cannot be heard. It's as if they are all rendered mute by their situation! We are left with only facial and bodily language which speaks so loudly. Emma, bereft from her son's death and her husband's declaration that she 'does not exist', is escaping the household. Her daughter looks at her with tears in her eyes, her daughter-in-law grasps at her body where Emma's unborn grandchild is growing, Emma's housekeeper is distraught and crying unashamedly in the upstairs bedroom ~ all of these women are drawn together in Emma who is about to become absent in their lives ~ it is unfathomable that this could have occurred because she fell in love. The film ends and we are left traumatised.