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.

The singularity of Colin Firth

I missed A Single Man during the Toronto Film Festival and missed it again when it first opened theatrically. I was wary of it, noting review headlines that often insinuated the too-easy yet suspiciously accurate-sounding attacks on fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford’s excessively fussed-over, largely superficial direction. What made me keep wanting to see it was, of course, Colin Firth. Is there another leading actor so consistently pleasurable and moving to watch who makes so many mediocre movies? Would A Single Man be the one to showcase his tremendous blend of talent and pure screen presence? It has, in any event, won him an Oscar nomination.


Having finally caught up with A Single Man—the depiction of a day in the life of Firth’s Anglo-American English professor George, mourning the loss of his lover, set in November of 1962, and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood—I was surprised to find the movie to be actually less glossy or formally rigorous or provocative that I’d intuited. Or hoped. It is an oddly cool movie for one so steeped in grief. There are loudly announced stylistic choices to be sure, but many of them fall short of their intended impact. Ford’s jump-cuts are annoying, and his jarring switching of angles within a scene is superfluous, often disguising stasis. His cutty yet ceremonialized flashbacks to moments shared by George and his conspicuously younger boyfriend convey little in the way of emotional weight. His combination of slow-motion and the shifting of the image from dull tones to saturated colour is employed frequently, which does help us to trace the many moment’s in George’s day when he briefly recognizes hints of beauty in an otherwise drab, Cold War era and now largely loveless world, but it also renders the technique a gimmick whose meaning is very limited. Besides, if George can so often be reminded of life’s value, even a purely aesthetic one, does his depression not begin to feel too close to mere self-pity?


Firth, unsurprisingly, looks very compelling. In fact, as unlikely as this might seem, with his lovely haircut, large framed glasses, and elegant suits, he closely resembles Marcello Mastroianni from roughly the same period in which A Single Man is set. (Julianne Moore, who plays George’s one close friend, by contrast seems modeled after Dusty Springfield.) Firth has absorbed his costume fully, letting it alter his posture and expressions. Ford’s careful attention to George’s personal appearance and accoutrements is commendable. It only seems problematic when it begins to seem like a replacement for characterization.


“I am exactly what I appear to be. If only you look closely.” This is George’s most memorable line, and says an awful lot about Firth too, whose best moments may be the ones where George, as a way of making peace with the world before leaving it—he’s planning to kill himself before the day is through—makes a point of saying something nice to women. In one such beautifully played moment, while complimenting a secretary’s hair, he almost looks like he’s in a trance. Firth has always had great success with a less-is-more approach to his craft. His eyes especially are exceptionally expressive, and his awareness of this allows him to make bold choices with regards to how much he lets his visage colour a moment. But A Single Man simply lacks colour, even during those moments when the whole world seems to blush for George, and Firth’s careful modulation and discretion, while still the best approach given the circumstances, can’t flush out what simply isn’t there to be had. George has some sort of revelation before the movie is through, though it barely registers on screen.


I’m thrilled that Firth is getting more attention as an actor, though I hope audiences less familiar with his work don’t get the false impression that A Single Man is its apotheosis. How much more alive, dynamic, charming, and emotionally vivid Firth has been in movies more obviously awkward or even tacky than this one. In some cases, more risky too. I'm thinking of one of Bridget Jones' Diary, and one of the all-time great comic punch-ups. I’m thinking of recent movies like Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me, where Firth played a single dad who was wildly neurotic, tactless, exhausted, and totally irresistible, or When Did You Last See Your Father?, where he played a middle-aged man seething with childish anger toward his dying pup. Hell, even in fairly awful or silly movies like the new Dorian Gray or The Last Legion or Where the Truth Lies or Easy Virtue… I could go on. The point is he’s a wonderful actor, and should he win an Oscar for A Single Man (which isn’t very likely, I suppose) then so be it. Just don’t let the movie’s undigested gloom let you think this guy can’t do so much more.

Wolf in chic clothing: Coco Avant Chanel

By focusing on the years between our heroine’s early gigs as seamstress and showgirl in a provincial musical hall—where she sings a song about a little pooch named Coco and inadvertently christens both herself and a global empire—and her ascension to wildly famous fashion icon, Coco Avant Chanel manages to stave off a number of the pitfalls that commonly plague bio-pics. The film steers clear of lazy psychology, mercifully failing to conform to motivational speaker oversimplifications about how successful and influential people are supposedly made. It also avoids simply telling us what we would likely already know going in by offering a sort of biographical greatest hits collection.


The Coco—née Gabrielle—Chanel depicted here is a woman frustrated but undaunted by compromise. She will make concessions, but she measures them by the millimeter rather than the yard, and never lets her benefactors forget that she resents having to surrender something of herself. Call it part of her charm. Raised in an orphanage and coming to adulthood with few advantages, she escapes drudgery by becoming a sort of kept woman—kept, but not contained. The difference between the two is perhaps the real subject of the film. It is in any case the most interesting one. Coco Avant Chanel is less a chronicle of upward mobility, or the designer/ businesswoman as a young cross-dressing social climber, than it is a surprisingly intriguing, sometimes sexy essay on the vagaries of self-realization and the oft-hidden moral untidiness of asserting a feminine or even feminist presence and sensibility upon an unsuspecting public.

Based on Edmonde Charles-Roux’s book L’Irrégulière ou Mon Itinéraire Chanel and scripted by director Anne Fontaine and her sister Camille Fontaine, the overall style of the film is rather more conventional and classy than the subversive nuggets of its themes suggest. The music from Benjamin Button composer Alexandre Desplat has a sprinkling of the twee-fantastic to it and gets in the way of a few of the thornier scenes. Christophe Beaucarne’s photography is likewise a bit too sleek and cute on occasion, favouring shots that isolate Coco, her back to the camera, in the centre of the frame, as if to say, Look, there’s a famous person, and the whole world’s just happening around her. But signals of the precociousness or uniqueness of Coco are thankfully limited to playable actions, her listening to the nuns and whispering girls at the orphanage rather than actively participating in their social life, her radical adjustments to hats and dresses and men’s clothes, driven by compulsion. Gorgeous pastoral scenery—Coco comes to live with a wealthy industrialist in his country mansion—is savoured without becoming too overbearing. The film is obviously designed as Oscar candy, but at least it doesn’t make too slobbery a show of it.


The tangled emotional lives of its characters fare well as conjured by the brilliant supporting cast, Benoît Poelvoorde especially. He plays the industrialist/sugar daddy, sliding gracefully between snotty, privileged presumptuousness and understated heartbreak over the deepening adoration he feels for this poor girl he ostensibly rescued. Emmanuelle Devos gives a marvelous turn as an attractive actress slipping into middle-age who Coco seduces by simply removing all the extraneous hubbub from her headgear. The relationships between Coco and these two characters form the film’s most fascinating threads. And Coco herself is embodied by Audrey Tautou with appealing reserve. She holds nearly everything back, as though fearing it’ll all slip through her fingers if she were to allow herself much vulnerability. It’s a good strategy for a leading player in a bio-pic, particularly one in which the heroine is distinguished by her enigmatic persona and her championing of sensible, form-enhancing—rather than overpowering—style. There’s a delightful moment where she orders a fussy tailor to “Do as I say” before finishing him off with a strangely sincere little smile. Tautou is at times characterized as lacking substance, but it’s the lightness of her touch that rules the day in her best work.

Dancing to the end of love: Bright Star

The opening credits hover over a close-up of needle going through fabric. The image speaks to the diligence and nimbleness needed to craft clothes, poetry or prolonged, unconsummated desire. It also lets us know that Bright Star will diligently hunker down for the worm’s-eye view should it yield another sharpened physical detail for writer/director Jane Campion to weave into this tapestry-like romance, something best surrendered to as with a current. Just lie on your back and watch the patterns unfold.

John Keats died young, and if his poetry went woefully underappreciated during his life at least it was redeemed by the not easily earned devotion of its muse. Bright Star, though inspired by Andrew Motion’s Keats biography, isn’t about Keats. It doesn’t burn much celluloid trying to turn writerly brooding or hand-numbing penmanship into cinema. Its protagonist is instead young middleclass seamstress Fanny Brawne, the first girl in all of Hamstead Heath to have a triangular pleated mushroom collar. When she first meets Keats—the year is 1818—she challenges the reverence aimed at the poet’s vocation, championing handsome, useful, innovative and well-made clothing over delicate words of limited practical power. The antagonism between Fanny (Abbie Cornish) and Keats (Ben Whishaw) is kept honest through the ubiquity of Keats sidekick Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a Scottish poet as big, burly and gruff as Keats was elfin, diminutive and soft-spoken. Their intriguingly un-straightforward triangle is just one of many forces working against the fulfillment of Fanny and Keats, another being Keats’ poverty. But as imagined here, theirs was a love emboldened by ceaseless tension. The film’s vivacity is the product of a harmonious collaboration between sensitive camerawork, production design, scoring and actors, at least one of whom giving the first outstanding work of what promises to be an outstanding career.

Cornish’s performance is of the sort where you can’t decide whether it’s a case of a role being perfectly cast or whether the actor’s invested the role so generously with some secret culled from within that she’s made alternate interpretations unthinkable. That confusion of unfamiliar and overwhelming emotions that clutches youth can be read in Cornish’s face and distracted hands especially. Imperious and anxious, she has the sort of face that when directed at you makes you uncertain if her gaze is one of derision or desire. What isn’t ambiguous is that you have her complete attention. Complimenting Cornish, Whishaw picks up where his Dylan-via-Rimbuad in I’m Not There left off, every smile teasing, every adoring glance half-misted over with the young poet’s inclination to admire Beauty in general as to recognize it in the specifics of his lover’s person. It works very well, while Schneider seems to growing into himself as an actor more and more—he’s more suited to this sort of bullying and jealous dreamer than he was to the agonized young lover in All the Real Girls.

So our stars are exceptional in their roles as young lovers, leaving us with the more difficult question of whether or not this sort of young love translates into exceptional movies, a question Bright Star doesn’t easily resolve. It seems perfectly unconcerned with the proscribed meter of classical storytellng, but the rhythm it adopts instead is almost unintentionally lulling, swerving from bliss to ennui, going up and down with young love’s customary tumult. The film possesses no shortage of moments sublime or nearly so, but these moments don’t add up to a great deal of momentum. So be it. Swooning heights of beauty and feeling trump structural rigour, and that’s fine by me.

What Campion excels at here is fidelity to the subjective experience of her characters, which requires both the acknowledgement of societal limitations—such as the presumptions made by Brown and others that young women are poorly fit to comprehend poetry—and a way of evoking sensuality that embraces the transcendental. In dealing with the latter challenge, Bright Star seems to share a certain kinship with the films of Terrence Malick, The New World most especially, not only because of its star-crossed period romance but because of its grounding in the celebration of nature found in poetry. Chalk it up to mimetic license: a poetic movie about poetry, and one teeming with loveliness.

Knocked Up: Keira Knightley strives for something more than bad sex, nice hats and male babies in The Duchess

Near the start of The Duchess, Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley), newly wed to the deeply dour Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), critiques a long-winded dinner party speech made by Charles Fox (the wonderful Simon McBurney), declaring dubious his rhetoric about freedom in moderation. One is or isn’t free, Georgiana counters, it is not subject to degrees. It’s one of those movie moments seemingly designed to convey the precociousness of the protagonist, yet, in an interesting reversal of the convention, the next hour and a half of The Duchess will pretty much sink that theory of hers to the bottom of the ocean: Georgiana herself will indeed know the taste of freedom, but it will never be open to her fully.

Based on Amanda Foreman’s biography, Saul Dibb’s The Duchess is a smartly constructed, only slightly overcooked historical feminist tear-jerker, ushering Georgiana into dreary wedlock with one royally cold fish. The Duke’s exclusive interest in producing male progeny requires him only to comfortably house his wife and stick it in every now and then like some devout if lifeless gambler mechanically plugging so many coins into the slots. Like any prudent gambler—and closet rapist—he also circulates the room and tries his hand at other suitable receptacles, eventually taking as his live-in mistress one Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), a homeless aristocrat and battered woman both more bosomy than his wife and bearing a solid track record for birthing males. (And in one especially splendid little boudoir scene, Bess also proves herself a trusty sexual therapist for the whole family.) This same courtesy is not extended to Georgiana, whose affair with future prime minister Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper) ends prematurely in some nasty blackmail orchestrated by the Duke and reinforced by Georgiana’s own mom (Charlotte Rampling).

Bouncing between a public persona as celebrity political campaigner and formidable fashionista and a private life of sexual frustration and emotional neglect tempered only by her embracing of motherhood, Knightley really is quite impressive here, embodying both sassy poise in a delicious array of hats, chokers, wigs and gowns, and frailty veiled by the same opulent wardrobe, her delicate figure slowly collapsing before our eyes as the manor walls close in. Fiennes on the other hand is an altogether different sort of presence in the film, certainly more static. His casting’s hardly imaginative and his masterful way with eliminating all signs of human warmth gives him almost nowhere to go. Yet even within the confinements of his role there’s considerable nuance to enjoy, and I suppose its Fiennes’ extremes of reserve that make his final, very subtle truce with Georgiana oddly affecting. Okay, like, really oddly.  

Dibb’s particular framing keeps certain otherwise purely functional sequences engaging, often observing Knightley in profile so as to better trace the gradual wearying of her spine, while clearly favouring Cooper’s hunky physique in their scenes of intimacy. He doesn’t fuss too much over royal pageantry and even throws up the final series of what-happened-later over well-chosen images instead of over the usual drawn-out blacks. Dibb also has the good sense to leave all similarities to later beloved English roses also named Spencer who were also tragically thrust into loveless royal marriages entirely up to the deductive powers of the audience.