The Substance of Style

I recently saw Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as Emma, a Russian married into a wealthy Italian textile dynasty. Upon learning of her daughter's homosexuality, she is inspired to escape the imprisonment of the suffocating bourgeois and spark a passionate affair with one of her son's friends. It's aesthetic stylization of the highest order: Milanese villas draped in luxurious furnishings, characters constantly adorned in sophisticated high fashions and feasting on five-star cuisine, and a final scene bursting with waterworks and a roaring piece of classical music by John Adams. Imagine being woken up to a crystal chandelier shoved in your face and having Mozart cranked up to full volume, and that gives you an idea of the proud, elegantly dramatic bombast that I Am Love delivers (the tagline on the Italian poster was the appropriately grandiose "Everything Will Change Forever"). As potentially off-putting as this may seem, I surrendered to it's wavelength and was deeply engaged throughout. Which brings up an interesting discussion: when is it acceptable for there to be too much style and too little substance in a movie?

A Single Man, which shares with I Am Love a heightened cinematic approach and plots involving main characters undergoing intense transformations, struck me as fussy and superficial. I mean, really, does Colin Firth HAVE to live in an super-chic art deco pad and teach at a school populated by bombshells? Predictably, Tom Ford revels in every pretty face and shiny surface he comes across. Firth's performance is magnificent, managing to sneak in a few genuinely raw moments, but the movie fails to live up to him. Why did I see the style of I Am Love as so indicative, and that of A Single Man as arbitrary riffraff?

This may not end up having to do with the substance (both movies feature well-worn plots) but the context behind it. I Am Love is heavily influenced by the glossy melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the films of Luchino Visconti (Swinton even described the film in an interview as "Visconti on acid"), where the style was just as powerful and expressive as the emotional substance on display. In addition, for all of the accusations of pretension it could have caused, I found its execution goofily sincere, following through on its overused "message" with a sloppy dignity.

Tom Ford, on the other hand, seems to have a frame of reference that dominated by photo-spreads for L'Uomo Vogue and models that look like Brigitte Bardot and Kate Moss. And the tragic-ironic ending wouldn't be so ludicrous if he had gotten serious and spent time nurturing the proper emotions to pull it off. For a large portion of the movie, Ford treats Firth as nothing but an empty object to be looked at or arranged.

Of course, analyzing a movie's worth by its aesthetics may all just be pure subjectivity. I prefer the candy-colored emptiness of Marie Antoinette to the razzle-dazzle buffoonery of Moulin Rouge! for no other reason than personal preference. And as much as Jean-Luc Godard pioneered the effortless mixture of substance and style with such works as Contempt and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, some of the substance goes completely over my head, yet I adore it anyway.