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.

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.

Awards