When you think of Tilda Swinton, you think of the word fierce. With an angular face and sharp features, she possesses a fierce beauty that is only matched by ferocity of talent. Underneath her self-possession and carefully controlled expression is a well of deep, tortured and conflicted emotion.
Her chameleon-like transformative abilities have made her one of the most noted actresses of our era — as the totalitarian leader of a post-apocalyptic future in Snowpiercer, or completely upending the image we’ve cultivated about her and playing against type as a magazine editor in Amy Schumer’s comedy hit, Trainwreck. No matter the role, every one of Swinton’s characters have something to say—about women, the role of women, and the society they inhabit.
The theme of womanhood, and more specifically, motherhood is something she explores in two very different films released two years apart: I am Love and We Need to Talk about Kevin. How mothers related to their children—more specifically, their sons—is a dynamic that has been explored since antiquity. From the ancient Greek tale of Oedipus, this primal relationship has been studied and dissected by every culture in every medium, from classic literature to modern day cinema. In both of these roles, Swinton highlights the struggles, pressures and limitations that motherhood can represent.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
In Lynne Ramsay’s film, adapted from the novel of the same name by Lionel Shriver, Swinton stars as Eva, a formerly successful travel writer who puts her career on hold to have children with her husband, Franklin, played by John C. Reilly. The film travels back and forth in time, and we come to understand that something is deeply wrong with her son, Kevin — so wrong that when other mothers see Eva in town, they slap her. Slowly, we peel back the layers of Eva’s family life to see what exactly Kevin did, what unimaginable horrors he unleashed that led to Eva’s social exile. But what we also see is a woman who gave up everything for her children, particularly her first-born Kevin, and her struggle to love him.
The film asks the audience to question whether there is something evil, something so twisted inside of Kevin that makes Eva incapable of loving him, or if there is something in her that balks at the idea of motherhood, and she has transferred that feeling onto her son. Kevin (played as a teen by Ezra Miller) grows up from a fussy, troublesome infant into a cruel and sadistic teenager, one who physically begins to look more and more like his mother in features and in adapting her personal style. As their mutual distaste for each other grows, so does their fixed obsession with what the other is doing and reacting and feeling — or not feeling. Kevin’s actions are every mother’s worst nightmare — but for a woman who never wanted children in the first place, Swinton brings a particular shell-shocked trauma to Eva, a woman who can’t seem to believe that this is her life and that this has happened to her.
See why Tribeca Film Festival Programming Director Cara Cusumano picked We Need to Talk About Kevin for her Shortlist.
I Am Love (2009)
Swinton plays a much different kind of mother in 2009’s Italian film I Am Love, from director Luca Guadagnino (whose latest, Call Me by Your Name, is getting strong world of mouth after playing Sundance and Berlin this year). In this film, she plays Emma, a Russian woman who has married into a powerful family from Milan. Emma seemingly has it all — a rich husband, two children, and all the benefits of wealth and fortune — yet something feels hollow. She is personally unfulfilled, performing as a wife, mother and matriarch of her husband’s business empire — that is until she meets Antonio, her son’s friend and partner, a passionate, sensual chef. Emma is instantly intrigued. She follows him through the streets, and soon after meeting, the two begin a love affair.
It’s an affair that threatens Emma’s relationship with her husband, her son, and the life she has so carefully built. But as she confronts her own sexual liberation, we see Emma turn from a stoic, carefully controlled woman into one who can no longer control her emotion — or wants to. I Am Love is a film that is all about grand passion, grand gestures, and the endless human need for connection and romance, even, and especially, for a woman in the middle of her life.
See why Chris Lowell (Veronica Mars) picked I Am Love for his Shortlist:
Stream We Need to Talk About Kevin and I Am Love now, free with your Tribeca Shortlist trial.
