I Am Love opens with a flurry, as the expertly-trained uniformed staff of an haute-bourgeoisie Milanese manufacturing family prepare for the Christmas season birthday of the leonine patriarch. The family members arrive, each magnificently attired (this being Milan, after all), and the soup (soup playing a crucial part in this film) is ladled from the giant silver tureen.
The great patriarch is ill and soon to die, and in a moment straight out of Greek mythology or Shakespeare, announces to the assembled his choice of successor to the family’s fortune-making textile plants: his middle-aged son Tancredi, who already wears the polished respectability of a titan of industry. It is in Tancredi’s sophisticated, museum-like mansion that the party is taking place and his elegant wife Emma (played by the stunning and absolutely amazing Tilda Swinton, who also produced the film) who is responsible for the clockwork orchestrations of the household.
But there is more, a surprise. For there will be not one but two successors, not only Tancredi but also one of Tancredi and Emma’s three children, the delicate and highly emotional Edoardo.
The stage has been set, brilliantly. Let the drama begin.
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