Director Luca Guadagnino certainly delivered a work of sprawling magnificence with I Am Love. Somewhat inexplicably, I felt physically moved at several points during the movie. This could perhaps be attributed to my secondary activity of the evening: perfecting the ginger cosmopolitan! (I think I got it right in the end)

I must confess that I unintentionally misled several guests, telling them that Guadagnino was a young director, and that this was his first feature. I really did think this was the case (where did this notion come from?) but in fact the man is 39, and has made a few features, one of which – Melissa P – I had the misfortune of seeing. It was a quite dreadful Cumming-of-Age (pun intended) story of a 15 year old girl, replete with graphic sexual abuse. Guadagnino met Tilda Swinton in the nineties, and as the story goes, the seed for I Am Love was planted soon after. The pair nurtured their “baby” until it came of age last year.

Swinton’s voice was dubbed fairly well, but clever camerawork obscured and confused, making it difficult to notice any audiovisual discrepancies. Her body was also rather well “doub’ed”, to coin a phrase, in a few of her nude scenes… to her credit, not all. In my opinion, Swinton was an inspired choice (although apparently, there was never another option) to play a Russian beauty who had married into a wealthy Italian industrial family. I totally bought it.

Or was that just the Ginger Cosmo doing the buying?

More about this film on IMDb