Ms. Richardson, in this post, talks about how big and daring this film is. I can’t argue otherwise. The ending proves this scientifically by putting the stroke of Creative power to maximum use. The ending is the kind that has been tested, time and time again, in the minds of not just the David Leans, but, I’d (naively, perhaps) imagine, filmmakers such as (gasp!) Sophia Coppola, to produce a kind of effect that’s tried-and-true when it comes to moving the audience at the very end. It’s the kind of effect that’s supposed to make the movie, and especially it’s characters, linger in the viewer’s mind for as long as possible. I’d even go out on a limb to argue thatthe ending of Coppopla’s The Virgin Suicides (which I went from admiring to disliking the second time around) creates the same effect of the ending in I Am Love, though with infinitely greater minimalism.

In both Love and Suicides, when the credits role, the characters stay with you not because they are larger than life, but because they are far more easily swallowed up by existence in one gulp than other people. Almost every character in Suicides is completely unknowable, and beneath that numbness develops a steady, if understated, uneasiness, but because everyone in this film is unknowable, there’s no sense on the viewer’s part that there’s something wrong with them if they didn’t empathize with their plight.

In I Am Love, Tilda Swinton is present throughout the entire film. We meet her family. We know her circumstances; how when she immigrated from Russia to Italy, she stopped being Russian, and became Italian with a seeming snap of the fingers. We even see just how woozy she gets from tasting the younger man Antonio’s cooking for the first time as she falls so intensely for him, courtesy of Guadignino’s extraordinary use of the camera to convey this character’s point of view. We even see what her dreams consist of visually depicted for us.

What’s striking (and off-putting) about this is that the Tilda Swinton character dreams only in snapshots instead of narrative, and that the snapshots in her dreams are of strongly concrete things such as two male hands holding a bush of grapes. I understand that this image is also probably symbolic of her deep desire for Antonio, but, to me, this represents within this character a talent for embodying her personal desires at the expense of her personhood. In the imagination of this character, her feelings, however deep they may be, are seldom if ever represented in human form. Instead they take the form of the objects that give this character the earthy pleasure she seeks and thus guides her heart whereever it will take it.

It’s almost as though in this film there lies no middle boundary between one kind of objective experience of the world, the aristocratic, and another, the earthy (and even the earthiness of the earthy experience has a kind of naturalistic regalness to it (the back to nature scene, for instance)) until this is interrupted by the familial relations between the Tilda Swinton character and her children and, yes, even her maid, as well as the story line about how what will happen to the family buisness now that the Patriarch Recchi has passed on. What’s problematic about these is that, while they do give us, sufficient, sometimes even great reason to care about all of the characters, the themes and challenges that drive the emotional lives of all the characters in the movie are just as overly universal as they are universally timeless.There’s no room for the idiosyncracy of experience in the lives of these characters.

It’s not that these charcters are types. Every last one of them is and feels very real. It’s that the reality of the world they inhabit is so hyper-sensualized that it leaves little room for the characters to show or develop more personality throughout the movie. In other words, the physical environments the characters in I Am Love exist in sometimes seem to be depicted as a means of upstaging the inner lives of these people so that the viewer is never quite sure if there is anything distinct from the universal going through any character’s mind.

So, back to the ending of I Am Love; given this conundrum of environment often standing in for, and thus sometimes superseding the inner life of the characters, it felt as the though the Tilda Swinton character was a representation of a universally acknowledged understanding of how life itself runs in cycles; things come into existence, they exist, than they soon cease to. When the movie ends, it ends with the sense that the Tilda Swinton character is disappeering from existend in a sweeping, elegantly grandiose fashion. At this point, even Mrs. Recchi’s husband tells her that she doesn’t exist.

One thing that is notable is how Ms. Richardson mentions the timelessness of the dress as being antithetical to the notion of nostalgia. To me, this does represent a kind of nostaligia for the belief that existence for ever; a belief that evaporates at the end like the Tilda Swinton character as one truly comes of age.

This, not laziness, why I’m choose to procrastinate on assignments I know I can ace if I put in the effort.

I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I’ve decided to cultivate within myself a ‘staple’ sense of vulerability. I was the person who wanted to be liked, but the vast majority of the world found that, for various reasons within and out of my control, too painful.

But with that being said, feeling vulerable is far more an enlivining experience than feeling safe. It’s the kind of thing that drains one of every last ounce of energy, only to rejuvinate the same sense of spirit that it suffused like nothing else can. And, although, for this I will pay dearly, I’ve always been curious to know what it’s like to die at age 95 having little if any sense of intimacy with somebody other than my parents (no friendships, let alone relationships). I wonder how exactly I’d contribute. I wonder how people would remember me after I’m gone–or if anyone, even my blood relatives, would remember me at all if they knew I existed.

I’ll stop right there. I’m starting to make myself nauseous, but, for me, the ‘fraility’ evoked by Tim and Eric, that, for me, at least, coaxes me into asking questions in a way feeling safe never could.

But I don’t mean for this comment to be an essay on how I was turned on by Eli Wallach.

What I mean to say is: Spot-on. Spot. On.

Max

“we are large, we contain multitudes & no one part defines us. why should it be painful, or shameful, or somehow less progressive, to simply acknowledge a mere few of the parts that make up our tapestry, while having the larger conversation of life (or film or art)?”

That is pretty much my view. I’ve reacted to Kartina’s emphasis on the role that race and gender must play in the creation of that tapestry and her use of certain racial and gender stereotypes in her essays about film. I don’t object to her position that she is most authentic when she embraces subjectivity when writing about film. I think it’s silly for any writer to pretend to be objective when commenting on film or anything else. I think it can become problematic though when writers express their personal perspectives through their art and then within the context of the personal, form sweeping generalizations about race and gender as if those assertions were grounded in an objective reality. If you read more of Kartina’s essays, particularly the one on “The Tree of Life” I think you will see what I’m talking about.

The truth is I like Kartina’s writing style a lot and I think she has a lot to offer as a film historian and critic. I wouldn’t post here if I didn’t. I don’t completely share Kartina’s worldview but that’s OK. She has a talent I can appreciate and that’s what’s important. Take a look at her “Badlands” review, it’s magical.