We Need To Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin opens with a scene that is visually beautiful and visceral -an aerial shot of a huge, semi-naked crowd covered in thick, menstrual sludge. A young woman, Eva (Tilda Swinton), fixed in a cruciform position, is passed above the heads of the crowd. And, then, as you are trying to make sense of the image you, suddenly, find its context: a Spanish Tomato festival. It’s a brilliant prologue, a perfectly crafted visual image used to maximum impact but without any whiff of sensationalism. In this image, all the major themes of We Need to Talk About Kevin are contained: the relationship between the crowd and Eva, the crucifixion of that woman due to the unspeakable crime of her teenage son and the effects of that bloodbath.

Based on Lionel Shriver’s popular and acclaimed novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin is the account of a mother’s disintegrating relationship with her sociopathic son. When Kevin goes on a killing spree in his High School, his mother is blamed for his behaviour and becomes one of the most reviled figures in America.

Each scene in Lynne Ramsay’s film has a jagged edged ferocity. Using a fragmented narrative that time travels between Kevin as a baby, a child and a teenager, Ramsay makes the audience work hard at piecing together the images so that they form a cohesive narrative. A lesser director would build scene upon scene in a conventional narrative manner, leading us to the final carnage in the school gymnasium. Ramsay takes a sledgehammer to this approach and, instead, drip feeds our minds with images and scenes throughout the film so that our imaginations automatically create the final horror without any aid. This is brave and bravura filmmaking.

The performances are also exceptional. Tilda Swinton is all fearful, brittle emotion and dead-eyed despair for her son and, in the end, for her own tragic fate. One scene has her prepare an omelette made from the eggs a neighbour has vindictively smashed. In an act of self-punishment for her son’s crime, she mechanically spits out the shards of eggshell from every mouthful. Jasper Newell as the young Kevin shows how children can use their affections and intelligence to manipulate and pit one parent against another. Ezra Millar, as the teenage Kevin, is both charismatic and terrifying, all teenage cool but with something toxic and hateful beneath the surface. This is a young man who has lost all sense of what might be described as “personhood”.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is chilling – visually and psychologically. If you are looking for a popcorn, Saturday night gore-fest then this is not it. We Need to Talk About Kevin requires that you fill in the gaps, make connections, question assumptions. I don’t think that this is a film that you could love but it is a film so clinically rendered that it is impossible to ignore. It reminded me of Andy Warhol’s car crash paintings (and there is a blatant visual reference to Warhol in the film) – horrible, but mesmerising and desperately sad. As much as you may not want to, you just can’t look away.

I Am Love: soup and the bourgeoisie

The main loci of interest for most "art house" films are the resilience and wit of the poor or the "quiet desperation" of the middle classes. In recent times, the lives of the rich have rarely been considered suitable material for the cinema. In the pursuit of "keeping it real", audiences have been fed tales of gangsta ghettos or the suburbias of white picket fences. The super-privileged have been largely ignored. Directors have turned their noses up at the upper classes.

Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love (Io Sono Amore) is a cinematic aria to the bourgeoisie. The film luxuriates in the suffocating opulence of the Recchi family. They live in a world so tasteful and stylish that a crease out of place would precipitate a family crisis. Tilda Swinton, the film's star and producer, has described it as "Visconti on acid" which captures something of the sumptuous luxury that the camera captures: pale carpets so thick that footfalls become mute, corridors as highways of marble, interiors designed with a glacial, restrained eye. The men dress in bespoke shirts and suits; the women in Jill Sander, Prada and Hermes. This is the feudal nobility of Visconti's The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) relocated from the Sicily of the Risorgimento to the salone of the haute bourgeoisie of modern-day Milan. Guadagnino observes

Milanese people think they don't have to show off. I've been in a house in Milan - one of the most beautiful houses I've seen, in Corso Venezia, it belongs to a very important Milanese family. I went into the kitchen and there were all waiters eating silently, and on the wall there were nine Morandi [paintings].

This is Milan - it's about being extremely austere, with the most high-luxuary things. When the grandmother gives the Morandi to Emma, it seems generous but it's not; it's an act of power - giving a million-euro painting, just like that.

Not since Peter Greeenaway's The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover has food looked so sensual and provided an exact metaphor for power and sex. The eating of a succulent langoustine becomes a moment of erotic epiphany for the main character, Emma Ricchi. Every element on the plate is erotically charged, a kama sutra of flavours for the sensual appetites. Meals in the Ricchi dining room become acts of power politics or carnal seduction. The rituals of the table define this class. And, in the end, a sip of translucent soup will play a part in the collapse of the House of Recchi.

The film's soundtrack is dominated by the music of the classical composer, John Adams (the first time he has allowed his music to be used in this way), a combination of aural minimalism and operatic expansiveness perfectly express the defining tone of the film. "We had a number of real blessings on this film," Tilda Swinton explains, "and one of them was John Adams, because we fell in love with his music during the last stages of the last draft. He was just in the DNA of the film." In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross points out that John Adams's "defining move was to combine Reich-Glass repetition with the sprawling forms and grandiose orchestration of Wagner, Mahler, and Sibelius." In other words, this music is perfectly suited to the telling a modern melodrama.

I Am Love is a melodramatic riff on the Lady Chatterly/Mellors narrative: aristo, in oppressive marriage, falls for gardener and finds sexual liberation. In the case of I Am Love, Emma Ricchi falls for a cook and upstairs meets downstairs in flagrante delicto. The description of this coupling (like so many of the couplings in D.H. Lawrence) is devoid of joy and humanity. An act of supposed emancipation, feels peculiarly corseted and straight laced. As a consequence, the passion at the heart of I Am Love is reduced to torrid metaphorical gestures that left me rather cold. We learn that if you marry for money or status or power you will get money or status or power, because love cannot be bought but that's the limit of any moral insight. There is, for example, no exploration of the morality, motives or consequences of Emma Ricchi's adultery. The audience is simply expected to be unthinkingly swept along by her act of rebellion. While, I enjoyed watching this at an artistic and performance level, I was far from persuaded by it intellectually.

I Am Love is a film of immense pleasures, every one of them beautifully designed, framed and hallmarked. It evokes a social milieu that, while aesthetically rich, is inhabited by an economic elite who are emotionally and spiritually infantile. As Tilda Swinton, reflecting on the Recchi dynasty, admits, "no unearned income is fair, after all; it costs the soul eventually." For all this melodrama's sensual delights, I Am Love left me hungry for characters and plot with more psychological and moral depth and flavour. Perhaps, that will come with Guadagnino's next film. I can't wait to see how this impressive talent develops. Until then, I will have to live with the delicious memory of that langoustine and that bowl of deadly soup.