Under a Red Roof

I took the day off Tuesday, writing not a single word of useful prose. Instead, I enjoyed an extended yoga practice, a perfectly pruning and exceedingly hot bath, and two very good streaming fil-ums (Why I like to hear and type this, I do not know, but it’s staying, for now).

The first was I Am Love with Tilda Swinton, object of one of my lady-crushes. The woman is a goddess, brilliant and beautiful, a style all her own, that certain je ne sais quoi that keeps me rapt. Which also reminds me of my latest man-crush on Michael Fassbender. I saw him last year in Jane Eyre and thought, well, isn’t he interesting? And those eyes! Then I heard him on Fresh Air and saw him on Charlie Rose and said, “Oh, yes please.” There’s nothing like an attractive man speaking eloquently of the work he loves. Indeedy.

Lest you get your knickers in a bunch lamenting my poor hubster and his wife gone off the rails speaking openly of her admiration of others, he’s got his own crush (and thinks Tilda’s pretty, too), and I wholeheartedly approve, on Emily Blunt, even putting her movies in the queue for him. She’s cute, smart, and a good actress. I would have liked to steal her Golden Globes dress, I might add. As well, I know for a fact he’d be over the moon at the chance to spend a day, week, or a month discussing everything tech with the Woz. So there. We’ve got our own good thing going, with crushes and silliness and all that jazz.

Anyhoo, enough of my digression, I Am Love is sensual and expressive, a very cerebral examination of a family that on the surface looks and acts the same as always but is roiling and changing and coming apart at the seams. Tilda plays Emma, a Russian plucked and inserted into a very bourgeois life (servants who dress her and wear gloves – can you imagine?) in Italy, speaking Italian and Russian (I told you; she’s brilliant). She is the mother of grown children, a good wife and cook, and a very stylish dresser. She is a master organizer, very much in control, planning parties and dinners with aplomb and ease. The slow unraveling starts and ends with a party, both of which look the same on the surface but are wholly different. Filled with exquisite food, immaculate homes, romance and infidelity and upheaval and picturesque landscapes, so very much at once. The score is fantastic and the cinematography some of the best I’ve seen. Molto bene!

Now to the Eames, Charles and Ray, who, like me, maybe you thought were brothers, instead of husband and wife, despite being fairly well educated on Modern Design. After the shame of my ignorance wore off, I really got into it, loving that the pair were so much more than really cool chairs. They made truly awesome animated fil-ums: puppets, stop motion, and drawn; collected ephemera, designed buildings, and worked, worked, worked, their minds like Vesuvius in a constant state of eruption. I loved their quirkiness, their manner of dress (so sweet and dapper), and how they truly loved everything they did, adding so much flair and panache to the world. Inspirational!