Tilda Swinton stars as the dissatisfied wife of a Milanese industrialist in I Am Love.

Credit: supplied

MOVIE REVIEWS (Week of July 22)

I AM LOVE

Starring Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini
Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Despite making every effort to add eroticism to gastronomy and raise a somewhat emaciated narrative to an operatic grandeur, Luca Guadagnino’s romantic melodrama, I Am Love, rarely amounts to more than decadent eye candy.

Russian émigré Emma (Tilda Swinton) is first glimpsed in her opulent Milan mansion, overseeing preparations for a dinner, during which it is announced that her husband and son will assume control of the family’s textile empire. Unexpectedly, the meal also introduces her to Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a friend of her son and a chef of considerable talent. When Emma later samples Antonio’s signature prawns, her reaction isn’t a far cry from Meg Ryan’s orgasmic squeals in the legendary scene from When Harry Met Sally. It’s hardly surprising, then, when the two begin a torrid affair.

Considering the film’s fixation on food, it’s wholly fitting (and undeniably inspired) when the appearance of a particular bowl of soup alerts Emma’s family to her indiscretions. Unfortunately, such instances of daring screenwriting are in short supply. The film’s strongest passages are those in which not a word is spoken, especially Antonio’s silent seduction of Emma in an overgrown garden. Otherwise, the clunky dialogue by Guadagnino and his three co-writers often breaks the spell cast by cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s glorious visuals and John Adams’s bombastic soundtrack.

Luckily, whenever Love finds itself on shaky ground, it has the fierce commitment of the incomparable Swinton to steer it to safety. Having shepherded the project for close to a decade (and picked up some very passable Italian in the process), she lends a remarkable physicality to her role, transforming herself from utterly ravishing to completely ravaged in the blink of an eye. If only the film itself were so dynamic. —Curtis Woloschuk

SALT

Starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber
Directed by Phillip Noyce

Less cerebral than Bourne, less fun than Bond, the debut of Angelina Jolie’s secret agent supreme, Evelyn Salt, is nevertheless a captivating story of international espionage, stocked with just enough twists to keep viewers guessing to the end.
 
After a somewhat jarring opening sequence in which Salt is subjected to water torture in a North Korean prison, the film establishes Jolie’s pouty-lipped protagonist as a star CIA operative specializing in Russian intelligence. Her loyalty is soon called into question, however, by a defector who fingers Salt as a double agent, spurring a massive manhunt aided grudgingly by her old friend and colleague, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber).
 
Almost non-stop action keeps the story moving at a quick pace as Salt struggles to outrun a small army of Secret Service agents, all while either trying to clear her name or complete her mission for Mother Russia. The nature of her allegiance is deliberately ambiguous for much of the film, adding a layer of intrigue that may persuade viewers to forgive some of the more credulity-straining sequences.
 
Jolie’s enthusiasm helps, too. The Oscar winner, who reportedly performed many of her own stunts, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best action stars, scaling walls, planting bombs, and kicking a mountain of anonymous ass. The film’s fortuitous timing doesn’t hurt, either, arriving hot off the heels of news that at least a dozen Russian sleeper spies were identified on U.S. soil.

It may not be a timeless classic, but Salt delivers, adding much-needed flavour to a fairly lacklustre summer-blockbuster season. —Andrew Weichel

SOLITARY MAN

Starring Michael Douglas
Directed by Brian Koppelman, David Levien

Once Johnny Cash gets through singing a decidedly sombre version of the titular Neil Diamond song, co-directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien introduce us to another man in black who walks the line: Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas). This dark-suited protagonist traipses the perilous tightrope between being utterly insufferable and undeniably intriguing.

We meet Ben six and a half years after his fall from grace. Once a BMW sales king and the subject of a Forbes cover story, he’s lost his personal fortune due to professional malfeasance. His well-to-do girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker) agrees to use her connections to buy him a second chance, on the condition that he get her insolent daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) into his Ivy League alma mater. When Ben beds the girl (who cuttingly justifies the liaison as crossing the “daddy thing” off her sexual checklist), his downward spiral takes on the velocity of an amusement-park ride.

Koppelman (who also wrote the film) and Levien have assembled an impressive roster of supporting players (including Susan Sarandon and Jesse Eisenberg), but few leave a strong impression, serving as mere story devices to reveal Ben’s more unsavoury aspects. This is Douglas’s show, and he turns in a vintage performance as a sleazy cad born with the gift of the gab and an uncanny ability for exploiting people’s weaknesses. (Solitary may well have been the training camp for his return as Gordon Gekko in the upcoming sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.)

There’s some dark enjoyment to be taken from Ben’s unceremonious humbling. By the time the sexagenarian is being beaten to a pulp in the middle of the street, however, the filmmakers seem to be grasping for cruel and unusual penances for their antihero. Resorting to such blunt-force storytelling in an initially sharp-witted dramedy is a disappointment. —CW

FAREWELL (L’AFFAIRE FAREWELL)

Starring Guillaume Canet, Emir Kusturica
Directed by Christian Carion

Attempting to combine international intrigue and domestic squabbles, Christian Carion’s based-on-true-events Cold War tale never meets the criteria required to rightfully earn its “thriller” designation.

In the early ’80s, disenchanted KGB officer Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kusturica) seeks to undermine the Soviet Union by leaking privileged information to its Western enemies. In order to avoid raising the suspicions of the intelligence community, he ferries the information through Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet), a French engineer stationed in Moscow. As the two men put themselves and their families at increasing risk over the course of two years, they also forge a friendship.

Despite its cloak-and-dagger trappings, Farewell makes but the meekest of efforts to generate suspense. These all come via hoary clichés, such as shadowy figures hiding in the back of cars and tense stand-offs at armed checkpoints. The only genuine entertainment here comes from snickering at Fred Ward’s dreadful Ronald Reagan impersonation, and marvelling at the wrong-headedness of a scene in which Sergei’s son (Evgenie Kharlanov) fantasizes that he’s Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. Otherwise, we’re shuttled between dull vignettes of international heavyweights debating policy and equally tepid glimpses of Sergei and Pierre’s increasingly harried home lives.

Kusturica and Canet turn in commendable performances, with the former enjoying the meatier (to the tune of martyrdom) role. However, Carion and co-writer Eric Raynaud pull the rug out from under their leads by having the film’s climactic scene hinge entirely upon copious exposition dryly doled out by a dour CIA director (Willem Dafoe, seemingly airlifted in at the last second for a couple of takes). Regrettably, such a blunder is simply par for the course in this misguided affair. —CW