“Julia” (2008)
Out of the backseat of a car, woozy, struggling to retain balance, Tilda Swinton’s “Julia” emerges from yet another night of bacchanalian debauchery. She’s weathered, pale, her dark eyeshadow contrasted with her pasty, doughy skin. It’s not the ravages of time as much as its the embrace of bad behavior that defines our protagonist in the early moments of Erick Zonca’s dark comedy. “Julia,” however, isn’t sentimentalizing or glamorizing our lead’s proclivity for damaging self-sabotage, if the weak paper cups and peeling wallpaper at her AA meetings are any indication. Soon, the extremely broke Julia finds herself wrapped up in a kidnapping plot that is nothing like what it seems, sending her to Mexico with a frail child she attempts to clumsily hold for ransom. Another actress would have played this for laughs, noting the contrast between a middle class alcoholic rubbing elbows with Mexican gangbangers and trying to figure out how to work a gun. But Swinton’s steely dedication to the desperation of her character is both more real and funnier than this approach, creating an indelible characterization of a broken woman who is both terrified by what she’s involved in and irritated that it’s keeping her from a tall bottle and a broken bar stool. Zonca’s kitchen-sink approach feels real and lived-in, focusing on the destroyed decor of shitty hotel rooms and the peeling leather of a car seat, and yet it’s the lead character that comes across as the film’s most authentic element.
“I Am Love” (2009)
There were two movies released in 2010 that aimed to capture the sensuality of Italy through the sexual reawakening of its main character, a middle-aged white woman (and both had the word ‘Love’ in the title). But whereas Ryan Murphy‘s “Eat Pray Love,” starring mega-watt superstar Julia Roberts, was filmed like an Olive Garden commercial, all snappy edits and smiling faces and M.I.A. songs on the soundtrack, Luca Guadagnino‘s “I Am Love” is deep, beautiful, luscious and genuinely sexy – all of which can be said about its lead, a bioluminescent Tilda Swinton. Set at the turn of the millennium, Swinton plays the matriarch in a family of textile manufacturers in Milan (some of that millennial dread creeps in with an international deal to expand the business worldwide creating uneasy bonds) and the movie positively bursts at the seams with oversized melodramatic opulence. This isn’t a bad thing. At all. Swinton’s young daughter is afraid to come out to her mother, Swinton develops a steamy relationship with a young chef (the film doubles as food porn), and there’s even a violent accidental death, all set to stirring compositions by John Adams which, if the movie wasn’t already shot in widescreen, would have added an even more expansive sense of depth. But it’s Swinton’s performance — raw, open, and immediately identifiable — that will leave you gasping. Her struggle to find identity and inspiration at middle age, in a country far from home, is sensuous and seductive. Not only does she weave you through the delicate emotional beats with a remarkable subtlety, but when it comes to the film’s final, showier sequence, unless your heart is made of stone, her character’s final desperate choice and act will leave you in tears.
Honorable Mentions: All of Tilda Swinton‘s collaborations with Derek Jarman are worth checking out, but first and foremost among them has to be “Edward II.” One of the director’s very best films, and a shining light in the New Queer Cinema movement of the late ’80s, Swinton deservedly won the Volpi Cup in Venice for her performance as the manipulative Queen Isabella, and it’s her first truly great performance. She’s also superb in an unusually low-key turn in Tim Roth‘s gruelling drama “The War Zone,” while taking the back seat in a very different film, Bela Tarr‘s “The Man From London,” but proves just as striking.