I am Eye-talian

Luca Guadagnino aspires to the look of Visconti and the soul of Rossellini in I Am Love (2010, MC-79), a film pleasingly saturated with film history, the product of a long-term collaboration with Tilda Swinton, who plays the central role.  She is the stylish matron of a wealthy Milanese family, which owns a textile factory that thrived under the Fascists and thereafter, but is about to be swallowed up by a global conglomerate.  She’s a Russian who was acquired by her husband on an art buying expedition there during the Soviet era, becoming an out-of-place ice queen to fulfill the societal role assigned to her.  Cracks begin to show in her opulent ice palace when the patriarch of the family bequeaths the business to her husband and son in tandem, because it will take two men to replace him.  What gets through one crack is a friend of her son’s, a chef whose food, and then body, initiates her into Lawrentian ecstasy.  This melodrama, luscious and fruity, is served with a sauce of John Adams music, and really indulged my taste for the likes of Sirk and Powell.  It’s all absurd, but swank and powerful, with a strong undercurrent of social critique, of capitalism and Italy in the age of Berlusconi.

A much more homely look at Italian mores is offered in Gianni Di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (2008, MRQE-70), about a middle-aged momma’s boy taking care of his nonagenarian mother and getting snookered into taking care of three other elderly ladies as well, and of the little community they form.  In a way, this film goes beyond neorealism to home movie, with the director starring and shooting in the very apartment where he lived with his own mother until her death, but the film achieves a warmly ironic tone throughout.  The four old ladies are a great aggregate of types, and in its own very domestic way the film offers as much food porn as Ms. Swinton enjoys.  This lunch is light and slight, but quite tasty within its limits.