That's the way I Am Love goes

The folding Paris of Inception is impressive and all, but does it or anything else in cinemas this summer have anything on the rapturous images of spot-lit haute cuisine, lustful bodies entwined in sun-soaked idyll, or the magnificent architectures of Italian cities and Tilda Swinton’s face found in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love? Does it say something about the tendencies of grand spectacle in today’s adult fare that the beauty, scale and ecstatic reveries of I Am Love finally feel like a bit of a beard for a story that’s arguably even more ridiculous than that of Inception? Whatever the case, I’m hardly immune to this stuff, so please take my critical reservations with a grain of the finest sea salt gathered from the shores of France.

It opens in wintry Milan, where the snow is virginal and cozily all-enveloping and causes no chill. The family of an aging textiles magnate gathers for his birthday. The house is a labyrinth of luxury. As dinner is served we tour the Recchi family photos, the dusk-lit furniture, the collections of Morandis. After the meal the patriarch rises to speak, the only illumination being the hard light bouncing off the long dining table, an ominously glowing centerpiece around which all are seated for a surprise announcement. The old man declares that he shall promptly retire and leave his empire under the care of not only his son but also his grandson Edoardo (Flavio Parenti)—apparently it takes two normal men to replace this titan of industry. You might presume the younger Recchi was selected to counter the elder with a modern sensibility toward business. In fact, it’s dad who will soon gallop toward globalization—and immediately thereafter to the bank—while the son clings to the past and his probably idealized memories of gramps lunching daily with the sweaty labourers. As I Am Love continues, Edoardo proves to be hopelessly, even tragically, out of step with the events transpiring either openly or clandestinely around him.

The other, more discreet inciting incident in I Am Love’s riveting first act is the late arrival of Edoardo’s new friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), another son of money, another naïve dreamer. He shows up to drop off a little something he prepared—Antonio turns out to be an inspired chef—before slipping away again into the night. Edoardo says he fell in love with Antonio—manly, Italian, platonic love, lest you get any funny ideas—after he tried his cooking. A similar sequence unfolds for Emma (Swinton), Edoardo’s beatific, hyper-organized, elegantly tailored, Russian-born mother, whose life becomes altered by Antonio’s visionary prawns, bathed in warm light, fresh herbs and glistening olive oil. Food is foreplay, followed by spontaneous shoplifting, and I Am Love, charging forward not only on the legs of Guadagnino’s colour-rich, zoom-drunk, almost cubist approach to coverage, but also the heart-pounding rush of the John Adams pastiche score, whisks Emma and the rest of us away to a hidden paradise of earthly delights straight out of Lady Chatterley.

High style locks into step with dizzy romance in I Am Love, and as long as Emma and Antonio’s erotic frolicking remains hidden from the twin forces of judging outsiders and sober storytelling, Guadagnino’s immaculate mise en scène, a glorious throwback to the heights of mid-century Hollywood melodrama—especially the films of Douglas Sirk—and mid-century European art cinema—especially the films of Luchino Visconti—carries us along on operatic waves of alluring symmetry that discourage consideration as to how deeply silly some of this feels. Then the third act starts and that silliness shoots up from below I Am Love’s delicate crust, delivering a combo-plate of familial apocalypse and overwrought wish fulfillment. The joys of I Am Love flutter ravishingly before our senses for a solid 90 minutes or so, but the pains of I Am Love burp upward in the last 30 and continue long after you’ve left the theatre. Should we recklessly throw ourselves into this fatty feast even if it all feels rather flimsy in the afterglow? Of course.

Lady Chatterly: corporeal and class liberation, this time nice and slow

Based on John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier draft of D.H. Lawrence’s scandalous 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover –a draft most notable for being less didactic than its successor– French wrier/director Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley certainly trumps all earlier attempts at adapting Lawrence’s tale of corporeal and class liberation. Pleasurably languorous in its unraveling, Ferran’s approach accounts for a broad spectrum of the sensuality and natural atonement Lawrence was championing. Landscape, seasons, weather and time; phallic, intricate flora; measured sexual exploration; a careful recognition of how closely environmental and spiritual disintegration are linked: all of these elements are woven into the mix here in what is a surprisingly absorbing two-and-a-half-hours of period adultery and unadulterated splendour in the grass.

“The body behaves in strange ways” is a conspicuous snippet from a conversation between several men near the start of Lady Chatterley, a film as much about the mutilation and emasculation of men by war and exploitive labour as it is about the oppression of social mores upon our erotic impulses. Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot) survived the trenches but lost the use of the lower half of his body. His impotence is poorly concealed by his authority over a mine and its underpaid workers. His wife Constance (the extraordinary Marina Hands) is, strictly speaking, surviving bourgeois wifedom, but is morbidly losing her sense of self-knowledge and vivacity. Thus its something of a miracle that she’s accidentally granted a glimpse of the gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) as he bathes his naked, muscular torso out near his cabin in an isolated clearing on the couple’s property. One look was all it took –from here onward, it’s a seductively gradual progression toward a chain of secret consummation.

Broad-cheeked and freckled, Hands’ Constance conveys her awakening in graceful moments of distraction, curious private examinations of her own naked body, and a captivatingly lucid series of exchanges with Coulloc’h’s touchingly vulnerable Parkin, who resembles something of a more hawkish, work-hardened Brando. Whether it’s a simple cradling of a breast through crimson velvet, the gentle stroking of cotton-covered cock with the back of a hand, a vast palm spreading over a thigh quivering in stark white stockings, some frantic thrusting against the base of a tree, or the utter abandon of the lovers running naked and finally collapsing into sex in the warm summer rain, director and actors alike have conspired here to express freedom with an immediacy that binds raw experience with philosophical nuance. It’s also, needlessly to say, pretty sexy stuff.

Through the basic story here is of course the outline of 400,000 impossibly banal porn and soft-core Euro-skin-flicks –not to mention the era-spanning trilogy of forbidden love masterpieces composed of All That Heaven Allows (1955), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (74) and Far From Heaven (2002)– Ferran manages to imbue it with thoughtful complications without burdening her film with too much polemic. Constance’s carnal desire is complicated by an equal desire to get pregnant. Parkin’s romantic needs are complicated by the irresistible call of his own solitude. Clifford’s role as the repressed master figure is complicated by his own tragedy. The viewer is able to find sympathy for each of these characters and still become swept up in the thrust of Lawrence’s argument for a balance between the dictates of the body and the mind, an accomplishment to be applauded.