Io Sono L'Amore/ I Am Love

I Am Love, is a meticulously directed movie by Luca Guadagnino, stylish, and surgingly beautiful in every detail. Even the insistent music by John Adams aids the lush visual style. The performances are all outstanding, down to the last supporting roles, and none more so than the movie's star, Tilda Swinton's. As Emma Recchi, a Russian who married into the wealthy Milanese Recchi family, she's transparent and opaque all at once, and through the movie shape-shifts majestically through the gamut of emotional phases of the human condition. And yet.Though thought-provoking, the movie is thus because it is confusing - how can so much accomplishment result in such a simplistic movie? I Am Love provokes a glittering itch that it doesn't scratch and thought it teases and promises for two hours, fails to do so in the end. It's based on an age old theme (this accounts for its rather literary feel, doesn't it? It's like you read it in a book?) of the contrasts of society and nature (this is at least as old as Shakspeare and as J mentioned, both D H Lawrence and E M Forster covered this theme extensively). It doesn't offer new insights, nor new solutions. It's weirdly inconclusive. Mrs Recchi runs away from the theatre and rituals of her privileged prison; She frees herself - to do what exactly? It's not clear at all. Can she live on love (if indeed it is love - her affair with the chef doesn't ever feel that central to her motivation) and sunshine alone? The last frame shows her entwined with her lover in a dank cave, suggesting a return to the bowels of nature but also of death - and it's sort of weird too. Should we all down our tools, abandon our family, and run off to the nearest sylvan glade? Is that to be a solution to society's ills? Can one be truly free in such a situation, or rather exchanging one sort of prison for another?
And yet. It's still a gorgeous, passionate movie and just to look at Tilda Swinton's miraculous performance (not to mention striding about in those Jil Sander outfits and Hermes bags) is worth the time.
It's certainly much more of a movie than Tsui Hark's Detective Dee And The Mystery of the Phantom Flame in every way. While it looks like a crowd pleaser, there's hardly any plot to speak of, and one just looks forward to the next special effects scene with spontaneous human combustion (I like this very much), talking deer and Carina Lau's brow-rising makeup (literally). Andy Lau in the title role is adequate; Tony Leung makes a convincingly creepy villian; Li Bingbing is very, very pretty and Ms Lau, as China's only female Emperor, Wu Tse Tian shows us what wealth and power can achieve. She's not about to run off to the nearest bamboo forest and commune with chefs, let me tell you.
And if you spiral quite a ways downwards, you'll hit rock bottom with the John Woo co-directed (with Su Chao-pin) Reign of Assassins. A decade after Ang Lee's influential Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which ushered in a new era of the wuxia genre all the top Chinese directors (and Datin Michelle Yeoh) are still trying to recreate Crouching Tiger. What they fail to see is that it wasn't a 'genre' film at all, just a very good one. Reign of Assassins is convoluted, confused and cheap. Every scene feels like a dead end and there is not one iota of chemistry between Datin Yeoh and the leading man Jeong Woo-seong (who could have saved the picture, but gave up, I suspect). It's painful to watch Michelle Yeoh try to reprise her Crouching Tiger role yet again, and if anyone should run and hide in the nearest pine forest for the next 50 years, she should.This is how Datin Yeoh will look like in the year 2032 when she is doing her 153rd recreation of Crouching Tiger. By that time, she will be a special effect.