Io Sonno L'Amore is a melodrama as florid as its star Tilda Swinton is pale. The "Io" in question is Swinton's Emma Recchi, the Russian wife of an Italian textile magnate; the "amore" is what the French would call "fou." The Dardenne brothers it ain't. Which is to say, yay!
Love unfolds in a movie Italy all too familiar to art house audiences who've seen The Garden of the Finzi-Continis or Il Conformista, beautiful and damned. Director Luca Guadagnino's vertiginous camera lurches across lush interiors, sumptuously severe Jil Sander garments, marvelous Italian chins and noses and blue eyes fringed with lush dark lashes, sun-dappled pastorals, and sweaty couplings. Everything is suffused with sensuality: a gleaming bit of fish, a ribbon wound around tapered fingers, a spiraling blonde chignon we've followed once before on the streets of San Francisco.
The soundtrack is similarly overripe and indiscreet. The horns that blare in the trailer echo the warnings against being open to physical sensation that sounded across the piazza in Santa Croce in A Room with a View. Like Lucy Honeychurch [and, indeed, her namesake Mrs. Bovary] before her, Emma comes alive in a forbidden love affair that will lay waste to the life she's known. "And why should she not be transfigured?" as lady novelist Miss Lavish [Judi Dench] asked in that film. "It happened to the Goths."
