THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
Luca Guadagnino gives the impression of traveling first class through the history of cinema, bringing back here a very clean remake of the Suspiria, by Dario Argento (2018), there another of The swimming poolby Jacques Deray (A Bigger Splash, 2015). Each time, the same result: cinephilic postcards, reduced to pure fetish surfaces. With Bones and Allthe “globalized” filmmaker signs his first American film which is equidistant from his forgery cinema as from his best film, Call Me by Your Name (2017), crossed by a beautiful adolescent romanticism and a bitter taste of the end of the holidays.
Anthropophagic romance that eyes the side of Romeo and Juliet, Bones and All follows the wanderings of Maren (Tyler Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) across the United States, the latter feeding on the bodies of their victims: born cannibals, they can do nothing against their devouring impulse and are condemned to marginality. While Lee has resigned himself to his fate, Maren struggles a bit more and follows in the footsteps of her mother locked up in a mental asylum.
A fashion accessory
As usual, Luca Guadagnino has seen films, and wants to let us know:
Bones and Allit is a whole tradition of the road-movie of the marginalized couple, of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), by Arthur Penn, to The Wild Stroll (1973), by Terrence Malick, who would meet Trouble Every Day (2001), by Claire Denis, a chic and shocking reference to the anthropophagous film. Very smooth bluette, almost touching in its scents of dark romanticism, the film nevertheless believes in slumming by debiting its references academically, its rusty America lying under a late afternoon light.
Here, cannibalism is a metaphor for nothing, or everything: heredity, desire, marginality, a desire for a wild film, but too well financed and decorated for that. It becomes a fashion accessory, an imagery which, at regular intervals, is the occasion for a feast as trashy as it is pointless. Guadagnino captures a profound America through the films he himself has devoured, and only offers a counterfeit and fussy version of it, where even the best of actors (Mark Rylance) gesticulates his madness as in a workshop. improvisation from the Actors Studio, while the rags of the heroes seem fresh out of the costume closet. Here, marginality is just a disguise, the Guadagnino style, a form of film tourism. Chic and toc.
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