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What is love?
Countless artists have questioned "love".
Love is freedom and a cage; love is innocence and sin; love is a flame and a glacier; love is purity and desire; love is destruction and salvation; love is the composition of all words, love is the mad beast of nature, love is the reflection of the self in life, love is the fold of time.
And in Luca Guadagnino's eyes: I am love, and you are love.
The judgment and awakening of the value of life is no longer a flashy reality, she has long known that what makes people intoxicated is love, so she breaks free from the shackles of illusion and walks in the nature of all things, she is love, she is the angel of sin.
When "Call Me by Your Name" was not yet sensational in the world film world, a director became a scrutinizer of love, and he exiled the instinct and wildness of love into dangerous nature.
We get a glimpse of the suffocating "sex" scene in the camera, the partial nudity, the wet tongue kiss, the breathing field, the intense heat, the madness of love, which is revealed in "I Am Love".
Luca Guadagnino inherited the image spirit of the Italian film masters, who, like Visconti, searched for a trace of warmth and conspiracy theories in the cold of the aristocratic class;
Like Antonioni, he places the emotions of the characters in a geometric sense of space, and tests the desolation of the human heart with the entanglement of love and desire.
Italy's retro charm, four distinct seasons, has long been captured by the camera to leave a sense of whiteness, together with Italian literary epics, opera phantoms, fashion design have been absorbed and used by Luca Guadagnino, forming a comprehensive embodiment of art.
Since the birth of the new century, we have hardly seen such a perfect film, yes, it almost perfectly presents a sense of artistic refinement.
This is the same as the images we saw a long time ago in Visconti and Antonioni, the rationality and sensibility of these film masters were completely absorbed by Guadagnino, who gradually formed a sense of self-imagery, breaking through a certain boundary of new century cinema, perfectly combining naturalism and luxury, and expanding as much as possible in "I Am Love" without reservation.
"I Am Love" can be seen as the predecessor of "Call Me by Your Name", the same director, the same theme of "love" loop, but presents two very different aesthetics, the former is mysterious and wanton, the latter is sweet and restrained; but the sense of white space and space of the lens has not changed.
"Call Me By Your Name"
Those natural ambient sounds that are slowly absorbed, a large number of local close-ups and emotional superpositions around the lens, and the projection of the character's inner love desire are enough to be fatal in Guadagnino's images, and what is it like to capture the breath in his films?
"I Am Love" is even more fierce, it begins with winter and ends with summer; it ends with death as the mark and rebirth as the end.
If "Call Me by Your Name" is a baptism of youthful growth, then "I Am Love" is the moral judgment of human desire.
We are also doing judgment, but the emptiness on the surface will destroy the truth in our hearts, and love is like this, and no one does not want to die for love.
An Italian aristocratic family, on a stormy day, ushered in grandpa's birthday party.
A seemingly gorgeous group portrait banquet, but only an individual mutation, such a turn we did not expect.
People talked in trepidation, staggered figures, and talked in the trance of candlelight, they talked about the food, wine, money, culture of this aristocratic family;
They talk about all worlds that do not belong to the self, and such group portraits reflect a kind of coldness and illusion. Behind this birthday party, it is actually the heir's succession and ostentation.
The son and grandson successfully inherited the nobleman's property, the granddaughter disrupted the rhythm of the banquet with a photograph, the son was indifferent, the grandson became the object of ridicule because he lost a ball game to a cook, the daughter-in-law was busy with all the banquet extravagance, the wife perfectly played the role of a noble wife, this banquet, Grandpa was the center, he was the manipulator of capital, and the rest of the people were all foils and symbols.
It seems that we have already seen the essence of this banquet, an elite family of the upper class, through a banquet to hide the inner silence.
People are invisibly manipulated, except for the two women, who hide their inner restlessness, trying to break free of the shackles and break through the cage with resistance.
An uninvited guest breaks the bustling sound and completes Emma in silence.
Anton is a cook, a friend of the heir of this aristocratic family, and the one who won the game, and his appearance is slightly lonely, forming two poles of the same world, but such two poles are precisely the director's intentional highlights in the center of the environment.
This is followed by the return from the group portrait to the interrogation of the individual, Emma is a foreigner, she married far away to Italy, became a hostess, the child gradually grew to adulthood, and at the urging of time she slowly lost her soul.
She fled from a celebratory feast, watching her husband and son as heirs, without any waves in her heart, she just wanted to sit quietly in her room and isolate herself from the world.
However, she speculates because of her daughter's secret love history, and after learning that her daughter is in love with a woman, her foolishness is stirred;
After learning that her son wanted to open a restaurant with her chef friend Anton, she intentionally visited Anton's restaurant and tasted a delicacy that moved her heart, as if it were a key to open the atrium of her heart, the so-called food color, sex, and freedom consciousness were suddenly awakened, and the fantasy of lust had never been so fierce.
So, in a close follow-up, she and Anton intentionally met, and their fantasy was no longer a passion need, but a spiritual collision, but also a bottoming out after nothingness.
Is Emma in love with Anton? We wonder, Anton also lacks such a passionate romance, does he love his good friend's mother? Can moral captivity stop love? We don't know that after that sex that became one with nature, Emma told her past: she was married, she was lonely, she was vulnerable, she wasn't even called Emma, that wasn't her real name.
When a woman, after the loss of fantasy and passion for life at the mature age, encounters some kind of spiritual support, she will put the dangerous situation behind, we can not stand in the moral dimension to comment, because this itself is also immoral, so Guadagnino does not mean to judge, he puts the spiritual nothingness first, and then fills the fullness of the character's emotions with naturalism and extravagant reality.
After Anton and Emma's secret love story is discovered by his son, the climax of another banquet heralds that love is more indifferent than death.
What is the end of this?
The son drowned after hitting his head after a verbal altercation with his mother, and the mother lost her voice instantly. Before that, the son's relationship with his father was frozen, the financial entanglement was controlled by the father, and he was nominally the heir, but in fact he was just a pawn controlled by the patriarchy.
He was crying, and when he discovered the lies of the people, his life had come to an end, And Guadagnino handled the scene of death with complete restraint, and the next surge was completely out of the rhythm of our movies.
Spatial narrative theory is the urgent embodiment of Guadagnino's final scene, and he uses the character's numbness, frustration, insanity, and awakening to create an act of escape for love.
Without a single line, Emma had already made her decision as she stood in the church looking at the fleeing prisoner birds, and that her son's death would bring her no more self-condemnation but freedom. At that moment, she may be thinking: life, only once.
So she told her husband that she loved Anton, and he treated him coldly and left angrily.
And she had never been so awake as she was now, and she rushed into the house and found a longing look in the public eye, which her daughter had passed on to her, and she smiled and nodded.
Finally, she is no longer a trapped bird imprisoned in a cold building, but an olfactory animal living in a cave in the wilderness, and she and Anton, naked with their souls, perceive the call of love in the gifts of nature, and because of love, she exists.
Luca Guadagnino's expansion of lust has become its own, and his heart is eternal, dangerous and charming, escaping the moral realm of real society.
A woman who betrays her family for love, but in Guadagnino's heart, it is a betrayal of the self, and it is equally sinful.
God teaches us to love, to love ourselves, to love others. In the sense of morality of Westerners, the wild nature of love is unstoppable.
In the same way, he attaches this agility to the image style, and we can avoid the moral discourse, that Guadagnino does not only speak of the shell of love, he does not ignore the falsehood of reality, this relationship is established and thus the confrontation of the bipolar world.
Seeing the end, goosebumps burst out, this is indeed a near-perfect work of art, in every way, without pickiness, but also thanks to Tilda Swinton's "god" performance, a friend of mine is very infatuated with her, so I think about this unpopular masterpiece.
On the one hand, we still have to maintain a reverence for "love", on the other hand, we must also be full of hope for "love", as the famous French poet Penshar said: love for others, also loved by others, this is everything, this is the law of the universe. For love, we exist. There are people who love comfort, and are not afraid of anything, anyone.