I Am Love

I Am Love is a 2009 Italian romantic drama film directed by Luca Guadagnino, set in Milan around the year 2000. Tilda Swinton plays a rich industrialist's wife who has an affair with a chef. It is the first installment in Guadagnino's self-described Desire trilogy, preceding A Bigger Splash (2015) and Call Me by Your Name (2017). Producers Swinton and Guadagnino developed the film together over an 11-year period. The film's soundtrack uses pre-existing compositions by John Adams. The film premiered in September 2009 at the Venice Film Festival, followed by showings at various film festivals around the world. It first went on general release in Italy in March 2010, followed by the UK and Ireland in April 2010. In the United States it had only a limited release in June 2010, before being released on DVD in October 2010. The film received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design at the 83rd Academy Awards. Inspiration Aside from a few minor differences, the Recchi family are largely based on the aristocratic Castellini Baldissera family, whose properties and ancestral homes were used as the set for the film. Piero Castellini Baldissera appears in a cameo role multiple times throughout the film Plot The wealthy Recchi family are first and second-generation textile manufacturers in Milan. Tancredi Recchi (Pippo Delbono) and his wife Emma (Swinton) are hosting a formal dinner party for Tancredi's ailing but still-formidable father, Edoardo Sr. (Gabriele Ferzetti), patriarch and founder of the family business, who is celebrating his birthday. As the many servants bustle about, the family note with disappointment the news that Edoardo Jr. (Flavio Parenti), Tancredi and Emma's eldest son, lost a competition the day of his grandfather's birthday. Edoardo Jr. arrives from that competition, having informed the family that he has invited a girlfriend. She is Eva, of the prominent Ugolini family, whom he plans to marry. Edoardo Jr.'s young adult siblings, Gianluca (Mattia Zaccaro) and Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher), complain of yet again being served "ukha", Edoardo Jr.'s favourite dish, a special soup his mother Emma, who is Russian by birth, has made for him since childhood. The grandfather announces he is passing the family business to his son, Tancredi, who has long worked with him, and also, unexpectedly, to Edoardo Jr.