Io Sono L'Amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)

I Am Love takes us into the crumbling upper echelon of Italian society, with a patriarchal industrialist formally passing on ownership of his company to his son and grandson. Meanwhile, the son's wife and her secretly lesbian daughter strive inarticulately to break out of the gilded cage of their mansion and the stratified behavioural constraints it represents.
Tilda Swinton, the focal point as the duty-bound and yearning wife, also produced and has talked up a good game about the film as the conflict between stifling tradition and the desire for love bubbling under that. But the film is too taken in by its own cosmetic virtues, with Yorick Le Saux's lambent photography and John Adams's overpoweringly revelatory soundtrack, and so the emotion remains locked in by the veneer of sophistication that Guadagnino purports to strip. Characters are reduced to walking from room to room and flitting nervous glances aside. This should have been a Brideshead Revisited; instead it's a lifeless episode of Dynasty, for all its artful prettiness.

5/10