2/10
You may well be love, but that's no excuse for a lazy, overwrought, incomprehensible, tedious, pretentious load of codswallop, which resembles a caricature of a really bad arty film.
It's very unusual for me to change my mind quite so dramatically in the course of a film. At the beginning, I was thinking it was worth a 6 or even a 7 (if it improved). By the end, I was wondering if I could give it more than 1 out of 10.
The film starts off on a snowy night in Milan where a very rich family is meeting for the patriarch's birthday party, at which he hands over control of the family business (textiles) to his son (Tancredi) and grandson (Edoardo). We also meet the central character, Emma (Tilda Swinton), a Russian woman who married Tancredi many years ago. It seems like a close and loving family, with an especially intense bond between Emma and Edoardo. But we assume that there will be some kind of friction or fracture - why else would there be a story otherwise?
The plot lumbers forward in a jerky and unconvincing way. Edoardo, who shows no special physical prowess, has lost an athletic race, and the winner - a chef - turns up at the family party with a cake. Is that really the best they could do to introduce this handsome outsider into the bosom of the family? Unfortunately it is. And so we meander on, wondering why there is so much portentous music and so many overhead shots, and whether Emma/Tilda can be quite as perfect a wife and mother as she seems to be (of course not). But we never reach the all important point of caring what happens to these people, who have far too much money (servants everywhere), and no redeeming features apart from a conviction that they are not only the most important people in the world, but indeed the only people in the world. I have a lot of time for Tilda Swinton, but even she cannot save this horrible excuse for a film from dying a long slow and painful death, with the final scene a masterly triumph of total garbage.
