Swinton speaks Italian! - and the world's weirdest sex montage: I am Love

Tilda Swinton speaks Italian (and a little Russian). That may be reason enough to watch "I am Love," which surprisingly places Swinton in an Italian-language, Italian-cast family melodrama. It's her movie, and she gives her expected totally powerful and controlled performance. It's also a really good movie, despite a few quirks. I'll be giving a lot away here, so if you plan to see the movie just stop now, but: I am Love is a story of a super-rich Milanese industrial family. The elderly grandfather announces his retirement at a b-d dinner and Lear-like, names son and grandson as his successors. Everyone's surprised he elevated the grandson. Swinton is married to the son, who's now the true power in the business, and plans to sell it. Grandson Eduardo sentimentally wants to hold onto the business - but his real attentions are to the high-end restaurant he want to set up with a friend, Antonio. Part of the fun of the movie is the ridiculously lavish house in which the Recchi family lives and the extraordinary food Antonio prepares, echoes of other great foodie movies like Eat Drink Man Woman. There are hints all along that Eduardo may have a homoerotic crush on Antonio but ultimately, to our surprise, Swinton begins an affair with the much-younger, "lower" class Antonio, culminating in one of the strangest, most graphic, least erotic movie sex scenes, including a montage of closeups of skin patches and insects on plants, set to the music of John Adams. Hard to even imagine, right? Ultimately, Eduardo dies in an accident and Swinton confesses she "loves" Antonio (it's more like a Lady Chatterly thing - pure sex, she hardly knows him). At the end, Swinton, now with short hair and dressed in track suit, takes off and leaves her grieving family. A liberated woman? Or a selfish bitch who ditches her faithful husband in time of need? I think the movies wants us the think the former, but it leaves enough room for us to wonder.