which could be subtitled, Bourgeoisie Behaving Badly.
For the first 30 minutes of this elegant Italian movie I was torn between nodding off and going home. When Hollywood wants to mock European cinema it sums the films up as People In Rooms Talking.
Talking Italian in this case. For talking is what you get, for what seems ages. Members of a super rich Italian factory owning family spend time together in changing permutations in a series of beautiful and beautifully filmed rooms in a lovely mansion, restaurants etc., wearing expensive deigner clothes and all being, unfailingly beautiful. While saying, well, almost nothing. It was hard to care about them. Though their opulence was routinely offensive to this leftist reviewer, none of them actually did anything awful enough to raise hackles or attention.
Screenwriting manuals tell you that by minute 3 you have to have a "hook". And around minute 15 an "inciting incident". None of that here. Someone brings someone a cake - gosh, is this a sudden turning point?! No. Though revealed in this lengthy opening is the patriarch industrialist grandfather's decision to hand over the reins of the factory to his son. And / but also to his grandson. Which the son is clearly not happy about.
In this opening sequence we alternate between these uneventful indoor conversations and some truly wonderful exterior sequences during which the cinematography is excellent. If anyone goes anywhere you can be guaranteed lovely wide shots of tree-clad hills or medieval cityscapes. But which gives the film at this stage a strangely schizoid feel, like watching two separate films which have been intercut.
But then, just as I was finally ready for a nap, everything changes. Suddenly, someone married realises they fancy someone they shouldn't and is overwhelmed by desire. Rapidly they pursue - literally - the object of that lust, so cue much sweaty and passionate coupling in the beautifully filmed long grass.
Suddenly the whole film changes. It speeds up with the heart rates and panting of our guilty but ecstatic lovers. The formerly split narratives of the visual and the dialogue come together and tell the same story. The already excellent cinematography hits new heights with a series of visual metaphors. Rain drips off medieval statues as if they are crying. Insects crawl across the foliage behind which the lovers are frolicking. Lots of super close ups. Increasingly the story is told visually, and at accelerating pace as the combined sense of transgression and jeopardy mounts.
The lovers' actions seem to have unlocked a Pandora's box as further conflicts and transgressions emerge. A daughter announces she is in love with another woman. Father and son fall out about the direction of the family business. The scale of conflict widens. Suddenly we are discussing tensions between owners and workers, and between poor countries and rich ones. We learn an important family member is really Russian. We go to London to meet with an American who is also an Indian, where we discuss global economics and development politics.
Suddenly we can understand that languid and very internal opening half hour. This was, like the finely shot interiors, the smooth, shiny and unflawed veneer not only of the family, and of it's central married couple, but of the bourgeoisie in it's hegemonic role as the ruling class in the oppressive system that is capitalism. The ideological basis of that hegemony denies conflict, we are all in harmony, this is the natural order, of course the rich should rule, and everything is beautiful.
Once the two lovers cross their own sexual Rubicon this sham is ripped apart and we see the reality behind the curtain. For the family's transgressor, lust enables escape from the stultifying atmosphere of the house, the family, and their particular bourgeois role. Their personal journey is mirrored in the film's move from inner to outer.
But anyone who has ever seen a movie knows that when people get naughty, tragedy will follow. But what? And to whom? How will the family react? Will we get a happy ending? Or a traditional Euro-artmovie one?
Towering over this marvellous film is a magnificent performance by Tilda Swinton, arguably the finest British actress of her generation. A performance grounded in the physical. At times, in those dinner party scenes, she is stunningly beautiful, made up to the nines, bejewelled and draped in a series of clinging designer dresses. Her manner as elegant as her accoutrements. Just as often though she displays with devastating power the raw ugliness of the sinew-stretched human body, whether at the peaks of sexual arousal or depths of grief.
Swinton's performance justifies the ticket price alone, as does the remarkable cinematography of Yorick Le Saux.
But note carefully, do NOT leave the cinema as soon as the end credits start to roll. Or you will miss the film's real ending. Where we see the resonance of the film's title to the existential principle, "we are what we do".
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