To Rome with Love ***

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Alec Baldwin, Alessandro Tiberi, Alison Pill, Ellen Page

Fabio Armiliato, Flavio Parenti, Greta Gerwig, Jesse Eisenberg

Judy Davis, Penélope Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Woody Allen

When watching the newest Woody Allen movie, it's almost impossible not to bring up familiar issues; the most prominent of all being, of course, how Woody always brings up the same issues. However with each passing film, it becomes more obvious that even if his themes become repetitive, they are never dull and a so-so Woody Allen film is still leagues ahead of anything else being done.

Take To Rome with Love for example; after the delight that was Midnight in Paris, it seems almost "mediocre" in comparison to the pure joy exuded by the previous one and the deftness with which it wove different eras and stories. Yet the truth is that in each European city, Woody has made a movie that reflects the city's personality through his own neuroses. 

Time and time again, he has exclaimed that his movies aren't autobiographical, and it would be easier to believe him, if he hadn't created a persona we have come to assume is the real Woody Allen.

In Rome, he plays Jerry, a retired musical director, married to a psychoanalyst (played with extreme gusto by the oh-so-ever-fabulous Judy Davis). Jerry is recently retired and according to his wife, equates this with being dead, therefore he sets his hopes in his daughter's (Pill) future father-in-law (Armiliato) a mortician who also happens to have an extraordinary voice.

Obsessed with turning this man into a star, in the process regaining back "life", Jerry dares to stage a version of Pagliacci that defies all good taste and after the critics speak unfavorably, his daughter goes "he's been called worse".

This fighting spirit, which acknowledges how Jerry didn't manage to please critics, might as well be meant to represent Allen's career. For all we know, what if the time-travel concept of Midnight in Paris had been deemed ridiculous? Or what if the ghostly themes in Scoop had been universally praised?

What we come to understand is that he isn't as obsessed with the result as he is with the creative process and that might very well be the unifying theme of the movie; how people are in a constant search of creation.

Besides Jerry's story, we have three other plots that make up the film: there's newlyweds Antonio (Tiberi) and Milly (Mastronardi) who get caught up in a misadventure borrowed from Fellini's The White Sheik and involves movie stars and prostitutes (played by Luca Albanese and Cruz respectively). We also meet John (Baldwin) a famous architect who becomes the voice of the conscience to the young Jack (Eisenberg) as he struggles between staying with his girlfried (Gerwig) or going after her free-spirited friend Monica (Page). Finally there's Leopoldo (Benigni in an unusually restrained performance) an everyman who one day wakes up to realize he's become famous.

All of these stories are told effectively and all seem to represent something that Woody might've wanted to explore further (perhaps on a feature length?) and the film's biggest flaw might be precisely that it wants to cover too much.

The forced finale of the John/Jack story for example (which echoes of the brilliant Vicky Cristina Barcelona) make it seem as if it's the resolution what matters the most and not the fact that we are never told if John is the older version of Jack, or if he's just a "friendly" manifestation of his subconscious or perhaps some playful spirit. Nuances like the Bergman-ian fact that Jack and John are practically the same name, get lost in the tangle of overwritten dialogues and awkwardness from Eisenberg and Page who never fully bloom as truly sexual creatures. 

Then there's the delicious ode to home as seen in the newlywed story, which might not be linked to any other plot (none of the stories ever cross paths) but shares a theme with Leopoldo and his sudden overdose of fame. Allen is a wry observant and lets us know he's aware of how all the Kardashians of the world are occupying spots that once were allotted to people who earned their notoriety on positive terms. 

The movie as a whole, despite its golden cinematography and constant reminders of the city's beauty, can't help but be tinged with bittersweetness, something Allen must've gotten from Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which also made us wonder about the price we pay for fame and reinventing our humdrum lives. 

While Fellini's masterpiece had almost nothing pleasant to say about our society and even declared at one point, everyone would give their backs to purity in the name of hedonism, Allen's take is meeker and shall we say humbler? He is aware of the destruction and chaos, but he makes us look at Rome, with its gorgeous ruins and timeless architecture, and asks us if this isn't worth trying a little harder for.

I Am Love ***½

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Tilda Swinton
Flavio Parenti, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Alba Rohrwacher
Pippo Delbono, Maria Paiato, Gabriele Ferzetti, Mattia Zaccaro
Waris Ahluwaia, Marisa Berenson

I Am Love feels like watching an opera on mute. Despite its baroque qualities, strokes of Sirkian melodrama and decadent visuals, its intensity seems muffled, brilliantly contained, so that we're forced to face what we see under a new light.
Anchored by an astonishing lead performance by Tilda Swinton, the film concentrates on the slight downfall of an Italian industrialist family.
The Recchi family is formed by patriarch Edoardo (Ferzetti) and his wife Allegra (Berenson). Their son Tancredi (Delbono), his Russian wife Emma (Swinton) and their children: Edoardo Jr. (Parenti), Elisabetta (Rohrwacher) and Gianluca (Zaccaro).
When we first meet them they are celebrating Edoardo Sr.'s birthday where he announces he's retiring from business and passing the business to his son Tancredi and his grandson Edoardo Jr.
His grandson's inclusion sends the first ripples of change as family and friends begin to wonder why the patriarch would do such a thing, especially considering Edoardo has just come from losing a race earlier that day, to a chef.
When the chef, Antonio (Gabbriellini), arrives at the party that night bringing a cake as a peace offering, or perhaps aware that he has unintentionally imbalanced the Recchi clan, there is a strange feeling of discomfort in the film.
Coming from the lush, long sequences where we saw the family smile and toast over expensive silverware and in even more expensive gowns, we suddenly come to the image of this young man standing outside in the snow with a box.
He opens the box to show the cake to Edoardo and his mother but we never see it and any feelings you might have that this mysterious cake is in fact a bomb about to explode, will be completely justified as the film unfolds.
As Edo takes a liking to Antonio so does his mother and in an exquisite scene we see her realize she might be attracted to the young man as she relishes in a prawn dish.
As they embark on an affair, the film's title begins to make sense as love lands on the Recchis with complete aplomb. Emma who at first had been more of a supporting character suddenly takes prominence (and you have to see how surprisingly easy it becomes for the fantastic Swinton to not steal the show). It's almost as if the film begins to get rid of the layers that concealed who she really was to begin with.
If you thought you had seen all that Tilda Swinton could do, you are in for a real treat with her subdued performance as Emma.
The chamaleonic actress slips into this woman with such ease that you have to wonder where one ended and the other began. Swinton's worldly features take on the quality of someone who know nothing and it's a thing of beauty to see her light up as she begins to discover the world for the first time.
Watch her in scenes with Rohrwacher (a strike of genius mother-daughter casting) as she shifts from flawless mother figure to full blown woman and later in scenes with Gabbriellini as she completely disregards these maternal qualities and turns them into complete sensual surrender.
Despite what the character makes us believe at the beginning, Swinton is in full command in this film; you can feel her love for challenging art in every frame (it helps that she's dressed by Jil Sander and Fendi) as she exploits and bends established genre conventions.
Because in the strictest sense, I Am Love is an efficiently executed melodrama with a straightforward plot we've seen a million times before but its mise-en-scene and planning reveals layers that serve as means to explore European economic history, various artistic movements and metaphysical notions of what is to love.
For example on the surface, Emma's affair comes off as something typical of a romantic novel (she's even named after Madame Bovary) but she's also used to explore the role that Russia came to figure in non-communist Europe.
We realize how Emma had to overcome her entire legacy in order to fit in this wealthy Italian clan. We learn that Emma isn't even her real name (her husband gave it to her) and we can assume she's come to form part of a life that would've been considered the antithesis of what she was before.
Therefore when she begins her affair, besides all the sentimental and carnal connotations, we can detect something else being said. Why is she so attracted to this young man who's so outside her social circle?
It can be no coincidence that Emma becomes attracted to the only character in the movie who is not bourgeois. Is she identifying with him, because like her Antonio didn't receive everything on a silver platter?
Is this affair an actual rebellion towards the forces of capitalism that the Recchis represent? This is particularly striking because in a subplot we see Edoardo Jr.'s refusal to sell the company to a huge industrial group out of loyalty to tradition. Guadagnino doesn't invest too much in this particular story but he is trying to say something about the way in which love subverts the notions we have of materialistic success.
Besides these political strokes, Guadagnino also pays homage to Hitchcock, Malick and especially Visconti (the first part is straight out of The Leopard and it's no coincidence he named one of the characters Tancredi...) as he indulges himself in long takes of these people's lives and surroundings.
Everything about I Am Love can get to be so majestic and pompous that we often are left wondering how it's also able to haunt us so much.