VSow can you forget the feeling of difference that gnaws at you as a teenager? Five years after the troubling Call Me by Your Namewhich bottled the awakening of the homosexual desire of a very young man, the Italian director Luca Guadagnino encapsulates the very essence of marginality, which pushes, in spite of themselves, certain beings outside the norm.
In Bones and All, it is expressed by a strange curse, closer to the disease than to the spell, which strikes a small number of individuals in Ronald Reagan’s America. Among them, Maren, played by Canadian actress Taylor Russell, haloed with a subtle blend of fragility and voracity. Living with her father in a dilapidated mobile home, the eighteen-year-old girl takes advantage of the tranquility of a spring night to join her friends. The slumber party turns into a nightmare when she tears a classmate’s freshly painted finger with her teeth.
A melancholic road trip
Obviously experienced in the exercise, her father packs their suitcases in a few minutes and flees with his daughter to another state, and another leper accommodation, which he will leave a few days later, leaving behind an audio tape containing a abort message to Maren. The man was exhausted. Who will take care of the little cannibal? Alone, she jumps into the first Greyhound bus to come, looking for her mother, whose name was revealed to her by her father.
Here she is embarked on a slow road-trip, masterfully filmed, whose warm, worked light illuminates each grain of skin or dust, pierced by the clear sound of a guitar with Western accents, in an aesthetic and melancholy approach to music. American “diagonal of the void”. In the lonely evening of an anonymous suburb, while Maren prepares for a night under the stars, a strange benefactor materializes, nose in the wind: it is Sully (Mark Rylance, chilling), old boy with a pseudo-looking Indian who never moves without the strong rope he has woven with the hair of his victims… Because he too devours human flesh.
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But he has principles: Sully only eats, he says, dead beings of their beautiful death. Taking Maren to a house where an elderly lady is dying, the victim of a fall, he uses the wait to initiate her into the mysteries of her sense of smell, which allows the “eaters” to feel each other. At dawn, Sully and Maren devour the still warm corpse of the old woman side by side, in quivering sucking noises, then get up, panting, sated, their chests bloody, shreds of flesh at the corners of their lips.
“Love doesn’t want monsters”
These images of devouring evoke this masterful scene of Call Me by Your Name during which Timothée Chalamet, in full sensual awakening, seizes, caresses, penetrates with his fingers, then with his penis, the juicy flesh of a peach, before crying with shame when his lover, hilarious, discovers the soiled fruit. Follow the impulse to the end, then regret – or have fun: the challenge is at the heart of Bones and All. The community of eaters of human flesh is divided into several categories, which Maren will rub shoulders with according to his journey.
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Abandoning the disturbing Sully, who sets off after her on a hunt with uncertain motives (does he want to protect her, love her, devour her?), Maren sniffs out the young Lee, played by a Timothée Chalamet from a beauty of a big crippled beast, starving and incendiary. Love hits these two like it only hits teenagers, and here they are together on the road, Maren under Lee’s wing, Lee in Maren’s shadow. They will come across an abominable couple, made up of an “eater” and his lover, cannibals out of taste and not out of need. They follow the trail of Maren’s mother, whose secret reveals to the viewer the violent ambiguity of the unnatural appetites of these strange predators, condemned to impossible choices.
“The world of love doesn’t want monsters,” the mother tells her daughter. But these young lovers want their share of life, constantly oscillating between the desire to love and to love each other and the devouring hunger that drives them, stirring up the foam of heartbreaking traumas while bathing in the deep desire to make family. Spinning gracefully towards a tragic ending, this barely gory film, which captures violence with more curiosity than ostentation, far from freak show or horror for horror’s sake, surveys the blackest impasse of our human condition. No happy ending at the end of the tunnel, but a great and poignant stir.
Bones and All by Luca Guadagnino, with Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell, Mark Rylance… In theaters.