I am love

Food is a favourite film fetish, as I Am Love (Io sono l'amore) reminds its audience fitfully.

A mansion-inhabiting rich Milanese industrialist's Russian-born wife (Tilda Swinton) meets her son's bearded friend, a chef (Eduardo Gabbriellini), during a grand Yuletide family dinner (he's baked a birthday cake for father-in-law's retirement day). The story moves to springtime, when an eggplant and elderflower appetizer convinces the son to back the chef's planned rustic restaurant near San Remo. Mother is soon excited by the chef's freshly blow-torched biscuit (for son's engagement party), and then cinematically and orally ravished by a luscious, artfully lit prawn dish (at the chef's city restaurant).

With one son engaged, her daughter's lesbianism suddenly revealed, and her marriage in a state of polite stupor, the mother is clearly primed for a full meal of sensuality. When she and the chef visit his farmland, the audience is only shown a quick blurred kiss, followed by a cut to black and Swinton portraying a feast of facial delight.

Her next course is a business dinner menu discussion (an excuse for the duo to have a day together in the wilds of close-up shots of insects and plants), which leads to a Russian fish soup (whose serving confirms the son's suspicion about his mother's fidelity, and results in his death in the family's swimming pool).

Highly symbolic Italian melodrama, the movie was reportedly a project in the minds of co-producers Swinton and writer-director Luca Guadagnin ever since they'd worked together on the 1999 London-set murder-docudrama The Protagonists. In 2002 the Sicilian movie-maker and Scottish actress made a documentary short, Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory. By then, Cambridge grad Swinton had her breakthrough role in fellow-Scot Danny Boyle's The Beach (2000). Sidestepping from UK art-house movies (honing her talent with Derek Caravaggio Jarman and Sally Orlando Potter) and European indies to the mainstream (the Narnia franchise), she won a Golden Globe (Best Actress, 2001, The Deep End) and BAFTA and Oscar Best Supporting Actress awards (Michael Clayton, 2008) and gained further recognitions for Julia (in France) and Burn After Reading (for the Coen brothers).

The redhead's distinctive chiseled features suited modern audiences' appreciation of bony beauty -- Cate Blanchett, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Gwynneth Paltrow among others following in the footsteps of such angular actors as Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Mia Farrow and Helen Mirren. (In reality, maybe Monroe, Gardner, Bacall and other voluptuous beauties were exceptions rather than standard models.)

Swinton is, as always, a pleasure to watch, as are many of the movie's locations (particularly the family mansion). Some supporting roles are good (Pippo Delbono as the frosty husband, Maria Paiato as the loyal housekeeper, veteran Marisa Berenson as the matriarch); the second son is a redundant character and the Sikh Indian-American M&A financier is a ludicrous distraction. Saddest of all, food fetishists don't have enough on which to feast their eyes and imaginations.