The Androgyne
by KARINA WOLF
How do you solve a problem like Matilda?
I Am Love, the recent Tilda Swinton film about food, sex and the oppressive ownership of luxury goods, begins as a wintry fable. In the film, Milan is as hermetic as a snow globe and populated by excess: another extravagant table setting. Another jumbo prawn prepared by a molecular gastronomer. Another privileged foot tocking on the expensive Italian parquet. Another heirloom tomato I wished I could pelt at the screen.
With its glorious clothes, homes and elegantly-scripted title cards, the film tells us that the unexamined life is well worth living. The movie concerns itself with a Northern Italian family – its venerable Russian matriarch, Emma Recchi, and her complex (read: avoidant) relationships with children, husband and self. As Alain de Botton recently tweeted, "She was so private, there were things she even forgot to say to herself..." Emma Recchi gives her own inner life a wide berth.
The Recchi family’s subdued wealth and remove recall The Garden of the Finzi Continis, but this time, the family threat comes from a changing economy and a wife’s awakening. Emma, we learn, has emigrated from her native Russia. The film portrays her as a victim of a kind of human trafficking of the soul, swapping origins for a privileged exile.
Emma’s past is preserved in her cooking — through this art she is reborn when she meets a chef (her son’s business partner) who becomes her lover. With nostalgia, she makes a traditional soup that her favored son adores; she teaches the recipe to her solemn lover. The chef prepares the aspic substance for a Recchi family gathering, and thereby reveals her transgressions. Emma is undone as a mother and a wife — BUT (the film tells us, IN ALL CAPS) maybe these identities do not fit her.
I Am Love is a movie (in fairness, like many movies) made of tropes: food as a gateway drug to an actualized life of sensuality and awareness. But food porn plus Swinton do not equal good story. Here, the gesture, the blandly remarkable settings, the simulation of sensuality are supposed to stand in for authenticity. Here’s an overexposed leaf or a close up of Swinton’s lithe but imperfect figure. What statement about the fragility and impermanent beauty of everything can we extrapolate from it? The movie is an attractive non-narrative as profound as a Louis Vuitton ad.
A film with Tilda Swinton typically addresses: inappropriate filial love, gender transgression, murder, a life outside the lines. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Swinton has given naturalistic performances in films like Michael Clayton and The Deep End. But her films are not built around a persona. Instead, they are predicated on the authenticity of her oddity. She embodies the Kantian sublime, inspiring awe and allowing no dominion by reviewers and critics. Even so, the critical rapture about her is somewhat puzzling — I suppose because (for me) Swinton is an actor who appeals to the mind before the emotions.
Catherine Deneuve might bear a similar, laconic blankness but the French actress tends to exploit stoicism for melodrama. And Deneuve’s straight-faced affect admirably contrasts with her beauty. Onscreen, appearance is (nearly) everything. What are your choices when you don’t resemble any of the types that typically grace the screen?
Swinton is the world’s tallest androgyne, a human greyhound, an alien odalisque, the perfect principal for a remake of Ziggy Stardust. When Uma Thurman first appeared, she attracted similar attention. Uma, however, was an ingénue as well as an anomaly. She was both beautiful and alien — and found herself lucky enough to become the romantic darling of a number of filmmakers who gave her roles that exceeded, perhaps, her native gifts as a performer.
I thought of the significance of singular looks when I was watching a screening of Antonioni’s Le Amiche — a remastered film from 1955, beautiful and unusual and full of the unpredictable narrative corridors and subjective reflection that are excised from films today. All of the characters had the most unusual names — maybe they are Italian pet names — there were Clelia and Momina and a very unhappy, self-sacrificing artist called Nene.
Eleonora Rossi-Drago (as Clelia), left, Valentina Cortese (as Nene), Anna Maria Pancani (Mariella) and Yvonne Fureaux (as Momina De Stefani)
The latter was the Italian antecedent to Tilda Swinton — her face somewhere between a Picasso Demoiselles-era painting and a Cocteau personnage. She was a wonderfully convincing actress, not only because she was a finely calibrated performer but because she was singular and unknown. (The men in this film were the marquee stars.)
Tilda Swinton is a director’s darling for a similar reason. She has acted in nearly 60 films without tipping her hand about her personal foibles and quirks. You might google Swinton and find reports on her unusual ménage: living with older baby daddy, younger lover and young son — but she doesn’t populate popular magazines. She is an abstraction more than an identity. Both supernatural and naturalistic, she is believably a fiction.
Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about Woody Allen. She tumbls here and twitters here. Her book The Insomniacs is forthcoming from Penguin Putnam.
"Century Rolls (1st movement)" - John Adams (mp3)
"The Death of Klinghoffer; Desert Chorus" - John Adams (mp3)
"The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra)" - John Adams (mp3)
deneuve