Io Sono L'Amore

I am confused and a little embarrassed by the responses to "Io Sono L'Amore". Even the people who praise this movie are embarrassed by it. The Manchester Guardian is careful to slobber on Tilda Swinton's Wellies before tut-tutting without eye contact through another 9 paragraphs. Even Manohla Dargis from the NY Times, whom one would think could get this sort of film because she's really hot, is careful to mention that she's familiar with the whole art-film-as-bodice-ripper thing, and that if she wept a bit it was just that damn gorgeous but literate molar twanging away. Ah, yes--the senses. We took a class in those at Fillintheblankfordbridge.

Even Anthony Lane, who seems almost unembarrassable, begins by separating himself from those who may have just wholeheartedly loved it. First line of his review: "The best sex you will get all year, if that’s what you crave in your moviegoing, is between Tilda Swinton and a prawn." Funny, sort of, but also through-away for someone like Lane, and mostly useful as a kind of Purell for sincerity.

Part of what all this makes me wonder is. Well, first of all it makes me wonder if I'm an emptyheaded goof. And it's partly the frequency with which that question comes up that leads to my other, also perennial, question: Is a certain sort of sensual knowingness actually an innoculation against the senses? Because in my experience if you open yourself to the senses they will fuck you up (that lovely mulled wine phrase). We all have our stories, and it's hard to tell them because they are specifically beyond words. They're about how we come to remember that something is beyond words, about how a single full sensory experience can mobilize years of thinking.

"Io Sono L'Amore" is about that. It's also about the growing and preparation and eating of food, about various shades of saturated orange, about the way that gorgeous interiors come to have the appearance of a real world and ensnare us, and about the difference between bodies when they are owned and bodies when they are royal. It gives itself to certain excesses. But I think what embarrasses people is that the camera lingers on the textures of things in the way that the senses actually linger. Before we drag them back to the task "at hand". So many tasks never so much as civilly greet the hand. (I love that cloth also has "hand".)

And but love. It is a pagan eye that ranges from the grasshopper on a tendril to the spires of the Duomo di Milano, and finds oranges and reds everywhere--Swinton's hair, upholstery fabric, flecks of light on skin and on clay, spices and fruits--everywhere shades of orange. And when Swinton makes her final appearance, or disappearance, pumpkin orange and a gold that seems to trap light spread from the saffron wool rug that marks her sudden absence to illuminate the memory of everything you've seen for the last two hours. Please see this.