IO SONO L'AMORE / I AM LOVE
(Italy 2009, directed by Luca Guadagnino)
For decades, the post-war Italian cinema has been admired worldwide for its visual opulence. Luchino Visconti's sophisticated facilities, Federico Fellini's exuberant imagination and image Sergio Leone's baroque iconoclasm, have just three examples to name, film history marked; cameramen as Vittorio Storaro, Tonino Delli Colli, Giuseppe Rotunno taught us a new look. The visual power of Italian cinema is partly due to the excellent cameramen and technicians of the Italian film industry, the other in the favor of the image to the soundtrack, which was reflected for instance in the long term preferred procedure, Italian film teams without direct sound. This meant the images - as in the silent film - the whole story.
seems to have forgotten the ailing Italian cinema, the great heritage of its cameramen and directors last few years. Only a few exceptions, are reminiscent of the Cup of past decades, such as the ironic, supercooled films of the Neapolitan Paolo Sorrentino ("Le conseguenze dell'amore"; 2004 and "Il Divo", 2008) or the Sicilian Giuseppe Tornatore ("La sconosciuta" / "The Unknown"; 2006 ). Very few of these films have ever made it into the German cinemas. Since it is especially gratifying to see that Luca Guadagninos masterly "I Am Love" ("Io sono l'amore") at last one of those rare exceptions among us.
"I Am Love" is first of all a melodrama: the History of the Russian Emma (Tilda Swinton) who has married into the dynasty of the fictional Milanese textile Recchis. The Recchis are war profiteers who have made during the period of Italian fascism their property. Now they live in a gilded cage where Emma is also a status symbol like locked. For the Recchis is the maxim of the prince of Visconti (or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa) "Leopard", that things are changing need, so everything remains as it is. Only this time played by women, because after Emma has learned that her daughter has (Alba Rohrwacher) falls in love with a woman and is undeterred by the social conventions of their way, they can also be located on a passionate affair with the unorthodox chef Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) a. Here it comes for family disaster that offers the opportunity for Emma to start afresh.
Luca Guadagnino positioned his narrative by topic and operatic, melodramatic narrative gesture and references as the cast of veteran Gabriele Visconti Ferzettis in the tradition of great Visconti family studies. But more than that it is the through-composed images with which Guadagnino Visconti's work continues. In both cases, the alleged aestheticism of the pictures are not empty in itself, but integral for understanding the rituals and rigid techniques of domination of the bourgeoisie. The central love story is in this context, the sign of the downfall of a long traditional world.
The director and his cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, who recently Olivier Assayas' escalating terrorist biopic "Carlos - The Jackal" photographed directed, highly artificial Bildtableaux of bewitching beauty one, that only the more obvious brilliance has put on the emptiness of the characters. This staged Guardagnino his film as an educational film for future Cameramen can and from any stylization: very long and very short focal lengths as well as extreme rising and setting tables, visual metaphors and lighting, by Headlight spots single figures accentuated from the ensemble picks out; Matchcut complex sequence shots and outreach crane shots, the film room put into a river, pointed assembly sequences and fast zooms that fragment and degrade him. The inner compartments of exquisite decor in warm tones and the contrast of complementary colors: in an immersed sparkle in the green room light orange wine glasses like emeralds, the redhead Tilda Swinton occurs in the royal blue evening gown. The outdoor shots contrast are dominated by steel-gray town impressions of Milan, San Remo, London, acting through the emphasis on geometric patterns almost abstract. Products of industrialization - endless grid of concrete and steel, screw-down winding stairs, glass doors and screens, high-rise buildings, captured from the camera as crystalline growths of stone - are facing in soffit covered churches and Baroque facades. This creates a world of sharply defined contrasts: old and new, inside and outside, appearance and reality. And in between: a garden of Eden, a summer natural environment, is reflected in the primary to the Swinton Emma perceptions - sight, smell, feel, taste - and about the love rediscovered.
The melodramatic gesture of Guardagninos film may perhaps seem somewhat forced to. But beyond that there is much to see in "I Am Love", and above all, to learn to see again. And that means here - and for a new generation of film viewers - returned to become the masters of the 1960s and 70s: to Vittorio Storaros camera work for Bernardo Bertolucci and Luigi Bazzoni and Armando Nannuzzis and Giuseppe Rotunnos work for Visconti. "I Am Love" is both melodrama and wicked commentary on the Italian bourgeoisie as a sensual experience.
"I Am Love" ("Io sono l'amore") - Italy 2009 - Director: Luca Guadagnino - writer: Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo, Luca Guadagnino - Production: Luca Guadagnino, Tilda Swinton, Alessandro Usai, Francesco Melzi D 'Erli, Marco Morabito, Massimo Violante - Camera: Yorick Le Saux - section: Walter Fasano - Music: John Adams - Rental: MFA + Film Distribution - Genre: over 12 years - Cast: Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Alba Rohrwacher, Pippo Delbono, Maria Paiato , Diane Fleri, Waris Ahluwalia, Gabriele Ferzetti, Marisa Berenson and others - theatrical release (D): 10/28/2010 - Length: 120 min.
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