You might be a great husband or wife but if your spouse meets someone to whom she or he is instantly attracted, there's nothing you can do about it, according to Italian writer-director Luca Guadagnino (pictured below).
That's a highly contentious view, I'd have thought, but that premise underpins Guadagnino's operatic melodrama I Am Love, which opens in Australia this week after screening in competition at festivals in Venice, Toronto, Berlin and Sydney.
Set in Milan, the sensual film stars Tilda Swinton as Emma Recchi, a Russian-born woman who marries into a rich, aristocratic family. After her father-in-law dies, and feeling she no longer connects with her three children, she falls head over heels for her eldest son's best friend, a young chef named Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), after a chance encounter, with tragic consequences.
The role was written specifically for Swinton, who starred in the director's first feature, 1999's The Protagonists, and collaborated with him again in the 2002 35-minute doco Tilda Swinton:The Love Factory.
To me, Emma seems trapped in a stale marriage and Antonio offered an escape from a rigid society, but Guadagnino has a totally different perspective. “It's not a question of temptation,” he said in Sydney. “You cannot control what happens in life. (Marriage) is a social institution: the boundaries that you give to love and relationships have nothing to do with our own nature and the way we can meet and connect with other people.
“The way she meets Antonio is fatal not because she's bored or trapped in her marriage or in heat. She experiences the reality of a difference that attracts her because it is unexpected. It's not that we have to behave like fantastic husbands or boyfriends. There is nothing you can do to stop something like that.”
The film also serves as a savage critique of the decay of the old-money society in Northern Italy, represented by Emma's husband Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), who ruthlessly puts profit before the interests of his employees and sells the family-owned textiles business to a brash Indian/American entrepreneur.
“Milan is considered the economic centre of Italy, a sort of fortress against the vulgarities of Italy today and a discreet charm of the bourgeoisie place,” he said. “That's not true. Milan has become as degraded and vulgar and racist as the rest of Italy, particularly as the place that Berlusconi comes from. I tried to make a homage to a class that is already dead.”
Marisa Berenson plays the matriarch of the family, a huge thrill for Guadagnino who had long worshipped her. “I understand why all these great masters – Bob Fosse, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, Visconti – have been drawn to her. She's like heaven; she is made of the substance of cinema.”
The director is virtually unknown in the US. His previous film, Melissa P., based on Melissa Panarello's racy memoir 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, chronicling the exploits of a 16-year-old Sicilian girl who uses sex to escape loneliness and parental neglect, was a hit in Italy in 2005 but wasn't released in the US. That could change depending on how I Am Love is received in that market. Magnolia Pictures gave the film a platform launch in New York and in Irvine, California, on June 18, to be followed by an ambitious nationwide release in more than 90 cities in 40-plus states.
That may seem an exciting prospect for the 39-year-old filmmaker, born in Palermo, Sicily, who badgered his mother to buy him a super 8 camera when he was eight, and voraciously read books on cinema. He went to university in Rome, wrote a thesis on the films of Jonathan Demme, but chose not to go to film school. He recalls meeting French-born filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub (who co-helmed with his wife Daniele Huillet classics such as Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach) when he was 17. A friend asked Straub which film school he would recommend to Luca. Straub retorted, “School? What for?”
Asked whether he's excited about the exposure his film is getting in the US, Guadagnino insists he already feels vindicated by the responses in the UK, Italy and at festivals. “Already this is a big achievement and improvement in my career,” he boasted. “Making movies is not 100 per cent formulaic. There is a marketplace and a need out there for something that is different. The idea that audiences want something that is expected rather than unexpected is a big lie.”
The director is mentoring 23-year-old Ferdinando Citto Filimarino, who was an assistant on I Am Love. He raised nearly $200,000 to produce a short film directed by Ferdinando, a Roman Polanski-ish thriller starring Louis Garrel (The Dreamers) and I Am Love's Alba Rohrwacher.
Currently he's editing his latest feature, Italian Subconscious, which he's compiled entirely from archival footage shot in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, examining Italy's occupation of Ethiopia, where he spent time as a child. He's hoping it will be premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in September. The tone sounds very different from his operatic romance but he observed, “In both I am trying to investigate the underbelly of power.”
