Toronto 2009: The Feminine Mystique

Reviews of closing film "The Young Victoria," "Mother and Child" and more.

Oddly, the best film I saw in Toronto was the last one I saw — Luca Guadagnino’s “I Am Love,” a film I’ve heard referred to as an heir to Luchino Visconti and Douglas Sirk. A tall order, to be sure. And Guadagnino’s epic but intimate melodrama lived up to the hype, beginning as a slow-burning drama about the Recchis, an upper crust family that faces a change at the turn of the millennium when patriarch Edoardo Sr. (Gabriele Ferzetti) passes on the reins of the family’s textile business to both his son Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) and his grandson Edoardo Jr. (Flavio Parenti), causing a mild rift in the family.

But the story then strays away to focus on Trancredi’s wife Emma (Tilda Swinton), who finds her passion again in the arms of Edoardo Jr.’s friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), an affair that threatens to destroy the Recchis. While composer John Adams’ feverish and brassy orchestration won’t let you forget when emotions are running high, Swinton grounds the film with her strongest performance since “The Deep End,” simmering with the frustrations of being a neglected wife before being enthralled by the possibilities of a different life.

Obviously, “I Am Love” is a film that wasn’t built overnight — Guadagnino and Swinton have worked together on and off throughout the past decade, beginning with the 1999 murder mystery “The Protagonists,” and that trust is implicit in what they pull off together here, an intricately plotted drama that seamlessly ties the central burgeoning romance to the crumbling of the family’s traditions in the service of globalization. To steal a line from “The Young Victoria,” “sometimes a palace can feel like a prison,” and while Swinton’s Emma can relate, her liberation is more thrilling than any jail break seen onscreen in some time. And even if one doesn’t buy into the swooningly romantic world that “I Am Love” presents when it isn’t dealing with the harsh reality that awaits outside the Recchis’ gilded doors, it supports the underlying truth of this year’s edition of the Toronto Film Festival — women reigned supreme

[Additional photo: "Mother and Child," Mockingbird Pictures, 2009]

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