In ‘I Am Love,’ Tilda Swinton & family refine the art of decadent living in Milan

Glamorous slightly older women, terrific clothes and furnishings, sex, exotic locales - but it helps to speak Italian.

So we discover in "I Am Love," a nutty little thing from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, starring Tilda Swinton, a nutty little thing herself.

Swinton's unique looks and talent have made her an Oscar winner and unlikely force in movies, but she has never abandoned her roots in experimental art films (Derek Jarman, Sally Potter), and "Love" (which Swinton produced) is a glossy version of those - more richly appointed, perhaps, but pretty far out there on its own goofy wavelength.

"Love" is the offbeat, aggregate profile of a wealthy Italian family. More accurately, a wealthy Italian family and its fantastic Milanese estate.

Guadagnino will follow his big ensemble cast around the mansion and eavesdrop on a conversation in an Altmanesque way, but then, when the actors wander off, he'll remain to inspect a painting, a tapestry, a sculpture, a place setting, a floral arrangement.

People and things have equal weight in "I Am Love," perhaps the director's way of saying this family has become its possessions. The Recchis are prominent industrialists whose heirs have lost their passion and interest in the factories and technologies that produced their wealth.

There is a House of Usher atmosphere to "I Am Love," which opens with the Lear-ish patriarch gathering his extended family to announce that he's leaving the business to a son and also a grandson, on the grounds that no one man can replace him.

It's an insult, but he gets no argument from his son (Pippo Delbono), who is consoled by wife Emma (Swinton), but who seems resigned to the ebbing of the world around him.

One of the movie's subjects is the decline of the industrial West, the rise of its decadent, detached lightweight elites, but director Guadagnino knows how tiresome that might be, so his other subjects are lusty wrestling and delicious food, and weird combinations of same.

When Emma's playboy son shows up with a trendy (also swarthy) young chef (Edoardo Gabbriellini), there is an immediate attraction that becomes the scandalous, melodramatic heart of the film.

There is a funny bit early on, when the chef, not yet identified by profession, delivers a box to the mansion, and we're left to wonder whether it's going to explode. Turns out it's a cake, and that's a relief, but there is danger nonetheless.

The chef begins to court Emma, to seduce her with food, and there is an already-notorious scene of Swinton cutting into a highly sexualized shrimp (you kinda have to see it). Swinton herself has called it prawn-ography.

Soon, the sex isn't metaphoric. Swinton is nekkid, literally rolling in the hay with the chef, and in a gesture of stylistic consistency, Guadagnino again wanders off to examine bees and flowers and stamens and other suggestive things.

I think you have to be European to take this completely seriously, especially when the story takes a Douglas Sirk turn - Sirkus maximus, in fact, with an aggressively lush John Adams score.

It's hokey, but it's also alive and unique, and probably a must for fans of Swinton, and who isn't one of those?