She is art

Swinton’s new movie, the visually sumptuous “I Am Love,’’ intentionally invokes silent films with Swinton’s piercing eyes and striking, Garbo-esque visage conveying the heightened emotion. Swinton worked for 11 years to produce the film with her friend and collaborator, Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Besides silent films, “I Am Love’’ summons influences ranging from Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci to the ’50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk to opera: Works by American composer John Adams swell on the soundtrack, including “Harmonielehre’’ and pieces from his operas “The Death of Kling hoffer’’ and “Nixon in China.’’

“I come from an art perspective. I come from an art world. And I am a film fan. It’s a regular business for me to try to make modern a classical form,’’ Swinton said last weekend in Provincetown, where she was feted with the Excellence in Acting Award from the Provincetown International Film Festival. (“I’m embarrassed. I didn’t know I was getting an award,’’ she said. “I thought I was here to promote my film.’’)

Swinton, 49, is every bit the iconoclast whose interviews are peppered with references to Euripides and William Blake and, when faced with a fan’s camera, unflinchingly stares directly into the lens. Dressed in a long, white tunic over linen pants, her closely cropped blond hair set against alabaster skin, Swinton is an aristocratic-meets-avant-garde presence. She traveled from her home in Scotland to the Cape with friends and lovers in tow: besides Guadagnino and her agent, Brian Swardstrom, there was Swinton’s partner, artist and photographer Sandro Kopp. The pair’s romance has been recent tabloid fodder: he’s 30 and handsome; she’s on close-but-not-committed terms with John Byrne, the father of her 12-year-old twin sons. That might rouse only passing interest from film buffs if not for the life-imitating-art aspect. In “I Am Love,’’ Swinton plays Russian-born Emma, who marries into the wealthy Recchi family of Milan (Swinton delivers her lines in perfect Russian-accented Italian). With her children embarking on their own lives, Emma begins a torrid romance with her son’s friend Antonio, a young, handsome chef who creates gastronomic works of art.

Despite a successful Hollywood career and an Oscar for her role as a corporate lawyer in 2007’s “Michael Clayton,’’ Swinton says her favorite projects remain the highly personal ones that come from friendships. This muse-and-muse relationship began with Derek Jarman and “Caravaggio’’ in 1986 and continued through seven films until Jarman’s death in 1994. Sally Potter’s “Orlando’’ (1992) took Swinton from the avant-garde into indie-film consciousness. Swinton and Guadagnino first worked together on “The Protagonists’’ in 1999 and on “Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory,’’ a 2002 documentary short that features Swinton talking to the camera about l’amour. It was an appetizer, of sorts, before the feast of “I Am Love.’’

“Making work out of friendships is not only something that I obviously enjoy, and it feels like grace, literally, to go to work with one’s friends, but it’s about making real a sensibility that you share,’’ said Swinton. “All friendships have shared fantasies . . . so projects like these are necessarily ambitious and necessarily impossible. That feeling is key to the whole process, because very often that friendship is all you’ve got for that five years or 11 years, that shared enthusiasm and joie de vivre.’’

Swinton is in demand enough in Hollywood to turn up in big-budget movies like the “Narnia’’ franchise, as well as offbeat indies like the Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading’’ and David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.’’ “It’s a delight to play with people I admire,’’ she said, “but it’s not my day job. . . . Sowing projects from seeds takes a long time.’’ She’s just finished shooting the much-anticipated “We Need to Talk About Kevin,’’ about a mother whose teenage son goes on a killing spree at school, with director Lynne Ramsay, a fellow Scot who made the provocative “Morvern Callar’’ in 2002.

Swinton says during development and production, she and Guadagnino “talked incessantly’’ but it was less about the specifics of their story and more about “our references . . . Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or “Buddenbrooks’’ or Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly. Catherine Deneuve in “Belle de Jour.’’ By talking about those things, we never needed to talk about Emma,’’ she said. “We wanted her to be a character from a silent film, one with a highly developed inner life but not a communicative character. I remember saying to Luca early on that I wanted this to be the kind of film where we learn more about this woman from the way she wraps a ribbon from an unwrapped present around her hand than any long speech or exposition.’’

Guadagnino agrees that silent films stoked his ambition to create what he calls emotional cinema. “More and more, moviemaking is becoming the sort of visual medium where people talk to the camera in close-up and it’s all about putting dialogue into drama-shape. The narration can be written in different ways. There are words, but there’s also nonliteral language,’’ he said. “The language of light, of space and time and behavior. The language of the unexpected.’’

Guadagnino, 38, who was born in Palermo, Sicily, raised in Ethiopia, and now lives in Rome, recalls that he was just out of school in 1994 when he wrote Swinton a letter that suggested they work together on an enclosed script. He never received a reply, but that didn’t stop him from seeking her out when she was in Rome for a film symposium. Even though the proposed film never materialized, the ensuing partnership and friendship with Swinton taught the young director never to try to plan the outcome of an artistic impulse. “The movie that comes out is going to be different than the movie you originally conceived,’’ he said. “You must make the collaboration, the process, exciting and compelling and informed by joy.’’

Loren King can be reached at loren.king@comcast.net.