From Reverence to Rape: Tilda Swinton's Labia

Luca Guandagnino's I Am Love is the classic tale of an aristocratic woman, Emma, played by Tilda Swinton, who is oppressed by her domestic duty to an unloving and absent husband. Who can release her from her life of stifling luxury and expectation? A man! A man who's rescued many damsels in chick flicks and romance novels, the sensitive beefcake: Antonio.


I expected to like I Am Love. I had read excellent reviews (an 81% on Rotten Tomatoes), and it made for a great trailer. New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis called it a "soaringly beautiful melodrama." Anthony Lane said in The New Yorker that it is the "best sex you will get all year." You can't swing a dead cat without hitting the words "lush", "succulent", "erotic", and their synonyms in every review.

The first review I read that included a disclaimer in its gushing thesis was from Vogue and NPR reviewer John Powers: "It's sumptuous, operatic, and swooning with a passion so grand that, like most grand passions, or at least those of other people, it occasionally feels a bit silly."

Lane did not give his misgivings top-billing, but in the second paragraph he catches up. First, he describes the scene in which Swinton's character is sent into silent raptures when she first tastes her future beau's cooking. The room dims. The orchestra crescendos. The camera swings around her as her expression adulates the dish.

"Were you to wait and see the movie on DVD, chomping on Cheez Doodles, the sight of some rich European dame getting off on a glistening shrimp would look cheap and overcooked—a charge that could, and will, be levelled at the entire film. To which the answer is: Don’t wait. Like any good love story (or horror movie, or Western), Guadagnino’s tale of passions impeded and indulged cannot hope to maintain its dignity except on the big screen."

He acknowledges the film's grandiosity to the point of absurdity, but then he solves it for you: Go see it in the theatre! You won't appreciate it in your living room. In fact, he seems to feel that the "cheap and overcooked" contrivances are the mark of "any good love story."

Dargis closes her article with a concession that the sex scene in an wild meadow, spliced with shots of bees harvesting nectar, is "a touch ridiculous." However, this does not seem to bother her, nor does the stereotype of a woman who is unable to change her life without having the strength lent to her by someone with testicles.

My chief problem with I Am Love is not the melodramatic absurdity, it is the message. We are meant to accept the archetypes of the business tycoon husband and the perfect corporate wife in this world of unconscionable wealth without ever pointing the finger to the real culprit, not only of Emma's fictional oppression, but of the factual oppression of generations of women: patriarchal society.

The movie does not challenge anything. It does not challenge the reason why she feels that she only has the power to leave her husband when she has another man in the wings. It does not challenge the questionable ethics of obscene wealth. It does not challenge her decision to leave her husband knowing that she may lose her relationships with her children.

In the end, it is a film lavishly styled by the hottest fashion designers, interior decorators, and chefs as masturbation for super-rich women who all think, Emma is just like me! Who knows, maybe watching her affair helps them to justify their dalliances with the gardener.

I believe this movie was designed to appeal to a female audience in the way of popular woman's films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, with heaving emotion and melodrama. They have been derisively dubbed the "weepies."

Molly Haskell describes this type of film in her book From Reverence to Rape: The treatment of women in the movies in the chapter "The Women's Film":

"...it is soft core emotional porn for the frustrated house-wife. The weepies are founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear, but by self-pity and tears, to accept, rather than reject their lot. That there should be a need and an audience for such an opiate suggests an unholy amount of real misery."

Swinton is, as ever, thin-lipped, crane-like, and carved out of alabaster. The nude scene was a bold choice for a woman without a traditionally pretty body. I could have done without the labia majora shot, but it was in good taste (if it's possible to do a labia shot in good taste). But she filled the role splendidly, even if it was inherently limited.

I can't recommend I Am Love. It's a rich chick flick that not only entrenches negative stereotypes, but celebrates the kind of royal wealth that is responsible for so much ill in our world today. However, I'm more disappointed at the critical coverage of the film, none of which challenged it's message, only it's method.