The work of Luca Guadagnino has been nothing short of a divine miracle in my life. For the last five years he has been thrusting me into experiences which so aggressively awaken every sense in my body, that everything else feels monotone in comparison. He is my favourite filmmaker. And through a variety of different modes and genres, his work has touched me so purely and so singularly that, until now, I have struggled greatly to even articulate it. I’ve tried various times in the past to commit something to writing about the deep and profound level from which my adoration stems, including an abandoned 5,000+ words on Call Me by Your Name from three years ago, but have never managed to do so in a way that felt even nearly as necessarily grand and momentous. Blossoming through my adolescence and early adulthood with his work has been one of the signature joys of my life, so it feels right to finally be able to write something of note about his last six years of work.
Bones and All, Guadagnino’s first feature film in four years, is in cinemas now. Understandably, I have spent the last year overwhelmed by how much sheer anticipation I had stored up towards new Guadagnino work. I feared that there was no way any film could ever live up to the weight of my expectations and that I would be inherently disappointed. Then, I went to see the film the first day that I could. And as the credits rolled for Bones and All over Trent Reznor and Aticus Ross’ swelling score, I found myself once again, at a completely different point in my life, melted into my chair in a complete and utter trance after being chewed up and spit back out by the newest Guadagnino. My life had once again been irreparably altered.
Luca Guadagnino is an Italian director, writer and producer who has been quietly making mostly English-language feature films since his debut film The Protagonists (1999) premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In addition to a variety of short films and documentary work, over the next eighteen years the director would go on to make a handful of feature films, many of which staring Tilda Swinton, which would be celebrated to varying degrees within a small indie sphere, though never quite breaking through to mainstream recognition. In fact, even as someone who likes to think that I pay keen attention to the roster of talented working filmmakers, the oldest Guadagnino I had seen is A Bigger Splash (2015). And though that is a rich and exemplary text in which the seeds of much of his most masterful work can be found, it’s not where my love affair with Guadagnino begins. Rather, my star-crossed infatuation with Luca Guadagnino exploded like a supernova on Thursday November 2nd 2017, when a film called Call Me by Your Name ruptured the very fabric of my life.
"Is it better to speak or to die?"
In November 2017 I was a chronically awkward just-turned seventeen-year-old who was about three years deep into an ever-growing infatuation with cinema. Though this has remained true into my adult years, it was especially significant as a teenager that the cinema was my sanctuary. As a firm atheist, I still often joke with people that going to the cinema, which I mostly do alone, is my version of visiting a place of worship. There are a handful of electrifying cinematic instances which are the closest I have come in my life to a religious experience. They provided me with a sense of belonging, which I was especially desperate for during some difficult teenage years. And on this particular autumn Thursday, I had no idea that I was in for the divine intervention, spiritual possession, act of God of moviegoing.
School was out and, without any other obligations, naturally I ended up on the Cineworld website browsing new releases. Having seen almost everything available at the time, my curiosity was peaked by the title then unknown to me; Call Me by Your Name. It was notably odd that I had absolutely no awareness of this film as someone who, even back then, paid fairly close attention to the industry and it’s hot-tipped releases. After doing some preliminary research I was immediately surprised to see overwhelmingly positive reviews from the handful of critics who had seen it when it premiered at various film festivals earlier in the year. I read a brief synopsis which really only revealed two things; that the film was set in the Italian countryside and that it was centred around the relationship between two men. I had, at that point, never heard of director Luca Guadagnino, nor any of the cast bar Armie Hammer, who I was familiar with from David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) (I am aware that this is unfortunate in retrospect, and obviously now find Hammer to be a completely repulsive person, while being able to separate him entirely from my feelings about his films). It was enough to entice me, and soon I was settling into my chair as the lights dimmed, having never been able to foresee that two hours and twelve minutes later, nothing would ever be the same.
I remember it so vividly on a primal level. It’s a sense memory that has been burned into me. In the cinema’s smallest screen, with only four or five others scattered around me, the striking blue Sony Pictures Classics logo flashed across the screen and then, the sound of John Adams’ orchestral Hallelujah Junction – 1st movement - assaulted my ears. The first note of the piece is eternally seared into my memory. The opening credits played, cursive text on the screen simply read “Summer 1983” and then “somewhere in northern Italy” and that was it. I was there.
I remember almost nothing but complete numbness throughout that first viewing. I melted into the screen and can hardly conjure thoughts or feelings with any specificity. I completely surrendered myself to its all-encompassing enchantment. The next thing which is clear in my recollection is the end. Those familiar with the film will know that Call Me by Your Name concludes with a four-minute-long single-take of Timothée Chalamet’s Elio Perlman as he sits in front of a fireplace and silently weeps, as the credits begin rolling over the footage. I sat frozen through every second of the credits, terrified of moving and breaking the spell I found myself in. Timothée’s face finally left the screen (although I must tell you that since that moment his face has never for one second left my mind), final logos and text appeared and eventually the lights were switched on, and even so I remained motionless. It was a shellshock experience which I had never before felt and have still not since replicated. It was just me and one other woman left in the room and I will never forget how, for a fleeting moment, we stared at each other, locked in the shared moment of what we had just experienced. It was only when cinema staff entered and looked puzzled as to why two women were still sitting in their seats, that I managed to peel myself off the chair and thrust myself back into reality.
In the coming months and years, I would written countless reviews and short examinations of the film on Letterboxd and Instagram through various rewatches, as well as my previously mentioned long-abandoned 5,000+ word essay about the film, all of which I now cringe at in comparison to the dialect I have since developed which allows me to now articulate my feelings about media in a far more adequate way. The first thing I ever wrote about Call Me by Your Name though, the evening after I saw it, is a wonderfully pure encapsulation of my seventeen-year-old self and the impact it had on me. It reads:
“For the first time in my whole life a film has left me quite truly and honestly speechless. I am numb. I went to see this movie alone and when it ended I sat through all of the credits right up till the screen went black, scared to even move. The word masterpiece gets thrown around a lot nowadays, especially in the Letterboxd community, but this film is absolutely and truly a fucking masterpiece. From the very first shot right till the end of the credits. I have never been so utterly immersed in my life. Wow. Wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow. Not only my favourite film of the year, but now one of my all time favourite films ever. SEE. THIS. MOVIE.”
Call Me by Your Name is a transcendent adaptation of André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name. The film would not stay in the small indie sphere for long. Entering into wide international release in early 2018, a few months after I saw it, it rapidly gained acclaim, eventually propelling it into the award season conversation and to three Oscar nominations, including a win for James Ivory's adapted screenplay.
1983, somewhere in Northern Italy. Precocious seventeen-going-on-eighteen-year-old Elio Perlman spends the summer with his parents in their rural Italian villa, as they do every summer, on vacation from their main residence in America. Elio’s understanding of himself in almost every capacity is challenged when twenty-four year-old American graduate student Oliver comes to stay with the family for the duration of the summer and the pair awaken things within each other which may forever alter the trajectory of their lives.
Adopting the form of an intensely sensual love story told through the most muted expressions of repressed longing, from stolen glances to cherished touches, cracking open Call Me by Your Name exposes its endless maze of ponderings on complete sexual and identity awakening. In truth its far less about love or lust than it is the quintessential coming of age text, in which Oliver is simply the catalyst for Elio’s complete unfurling of the web of feelings within himself. Elio has both a desperate desire to mature as he attempts to conquer complex questions on his sexuality and identity, and the wide-eyed sensitivity of a small child whose parents still read him stories and stroke his hair like a baby. Balancing perfectly on the knives edge of a dreamy, meandering fantasy and a deeply uncomfortable and fiercely human realism, it’s an utterly enveloping experience which taps into our most primal fears and desires.
Call Me by Your Name’s world is conjured like a mesmeric painting that so immensely pleasures the sense with its all-encompassing beauty. The lush Italian countryside full of glistening bodies of water and sumptuous fruit trees can only be described as dreamlike, as cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom paints the utterly enchanting world around Elio. It’s a microcosmic playground for him to explore his angst and desire. Guadagnino became obsessed with Villa Albergoni, the grand seventeenth century home which lay uninhabited in the north Italian countryside. I have always loved the fact that he wished to purchase it for himself but could not afford it and so, instead, he rented it for filming to act as the Perlman’s exquisite home. The small rural town of Crema, the city where much of the film was shot, which I have since visited, I can confirm to be completely mesmerising both for Elio and myself. It is the most divine place I have ever visited. These locations are stitched together and painted like a watercolour until they melt into a glistening environment for Elio to inhabit as if he were the subject of Claude Monet, soundtracked by the hauntingly delicate melodies of Sufjan Stevens. I am so swept up in it every time, I am certain that Guadagnino’s 1983 ‘somewhere in northern Italy’ exists on its own plane of existence entirely.
However, underneath the dreamy haze of the summer is an incredible realism which renders a more unvarnished and wholly authentic portrait of human interaction and self-perception than I had ever encountered previously. Completely drained of the glossy storytelling sheen of how movie characters behave around each other, the film is absolutely brimming with almost unbearable awkwardness in a way which is so startlingly realistic. Everything Elio does is charged with overwhelming bashfulness and excruciating self-doubt and his interactions with Oliver build towards a fluid closeness which feel overwhelmingly raw. While making it a legitimately uncomfortable watch at times, this ultra-realism enriches the story beyond belief. A key tool in achieving this realism is Walter Fassano’s unusual editing. In almost every instance, scenes either feel like they cut away way too early, sometimes mid-action or sentence, yanking us out of a moment to drop us straight into another, or they linger for so unnecessarily long on a scene which we have been conditioned to expect to end. Forcing us to sit and simmer in the natural spaces between moments in Elio’s unforgettable summer.
And Elio Perlman, the entangled web of teenage angst and desire and perpetual precocious discomfort, is my single favourite character ever committed to film. Being presented with him for the first time, a perfect mirror of all of my own innermost discomforts being reflected back at me, I was completely annihilated. I was both terrified and titillated by how much of myself I could see woven through him. Teenage protagonists are often written as idiosyncratically, adorkable and socially stunted as they come of age and attempt to understand the things going on both around and inside themselves. And while this archetype isn’t necessarily absent in Elio, it’s completely shattered and then pieced back together. He is unbearably anxiety-ridden, not in a charming “I’m not like the other kids” way, but in an incredibly challenging and uncomfortable way. We see him painstakingly second guess everything that comes out of his mouth for the duration of his summer, scribbling things in his notebook like "I WAS TOO HARSH" muttering under his breath as he chastises himself for how he handled conversations, and being so overwhelmed by a contemptuous dinnertime conversation that it induces a nosebleed. He is constantly embarrassed and completely unsure of himself. While he has many moments of being irresistibly charismatic and funny, he is unknowingly so and it’s not for a lack of tying, as he tries as hard as he possibly can to appear that way at all times. He says and does things he thinks people want from him and is confused and often disgusted by himself as if his constantly developing mind and body are entities separate to himself that he has no control over and is constantly battling with.
Timothée Chalamet, though his appeal has now become too entangled with his teen heartthrob status in a way which arguably somewhat diminishes the cultural understanding of his talent, was unquestionably solidified for me here, as the signature performer of his generation. When I saw this film, I had never heard of him, having only had small roles in a handful of features like Miss Stevens (2016), and most notably Interstellar (2014) where he briefly played the young Tom. He had about 20,000 followers on Instagram when I followed him that night, compared to his now 18 million. And having no prior perception of him, I was left absolutely bowled over by the most formidable and commanding of performances. The signature characteristic of his performance style, which has continued to strike me through his subsequent work, is that he is an incredibly physical performer. His fluid movement is so in tune with his characters, here Elio, and shows such a keen understanding of his mentality, that in the subtlest and most elegant of manors, he is able to translate into a physical representation. It’s stunning work and I know this turn of phrase is overused, but this role simply could not have been played by anyone else.
Guadagnino’s work oozes this naturalistic, completely human appeal which, from a lifetime of searching, no other filmmaker has cracked open. It’s a fluid reflection of the human experience stripped of the idealistic trappings of narrative storytelling. I’ve spent the majority of my adolescent and young adult life feeling like I didn’t fit. I once described to my therapist, a deep-seated feeling I had been living with for years that there was this ease to the way in which others lived. Like there was some inherent ability you were born with that allowed you to conduct your life and communicate in a natural way that you didn’t have to think about. An ability that others had that I did not, and I didn’t understand why. Guadagnino is perhaps the only creative who I have felt authentically crack into this unspoken angst at the sheer, mortifying uncertainty of existing. It’s why I was so completely arrested by every minute of Call Me by Your Name as much as I was absolutely infatuated with its tender dreaminess. It was an utterly transcendent and transformative experience that to this day I have never even come close to replicating.
After initially remaining safe in a contained bubble of exposure, the film has since imploded in a way that I unfortunately feel has somewhat devalued its uninhibited mastery and corrupted its purity of expression. It’s been forced through a chronically online, culture war-fuelled framework in the years since its initial release. And it's been basterdized by both the misguided hate in braindead, anti-storytelling age-gap discourse, but also the misguided love in the reductive pseudo cinephile obsession on social media. Call Me by Your Name, though a reductive online climate may lead you to believe is as starkly simple as an age-gap love story, is about plunging off the precarious edge of our innocence. We may envelop ourselves in an illusion of comfortable safety there but ultimately, even if it will lead us to a spectacularly painful crash, the plunge is worth the price from what we may learn about ourselves on the journey down. For it is better to speak than to die.
"When you dance the dance of another, you make yourself in the image of its creator. You empty yourself so that her work can live within you. Do you understand?"
Released in 2018, directly on the heels of the critical success of Call Me by Your Name, in all of its lived-in delicacy, comes a film which could not possibly be more vastly different in every sense. That is, other than its sheer mastery, seeing Guadagnino collaborate with the same cinematography and editing duo. Suspiria is a remake of the iconic 1977 Dario Argento giallo film of the same name. And while there are a few other select examples which make it into the illustrious category of formidable remakes which are better than the original, I think there is a strong argument to be made that this may in fact be the greatest remake of all time, helped in large part by Dakota Johnson, who solidifies herself here as the ultimate nepotism baby to end all nepotism babies with one of the most audacious and affecting performances imaginable.
In this gnarly, perverse ode to female repression and grasp for power told through the lens of witchcraft, young all-American Susie Bannion, played by Johnson, travels to Berlin in the 1970s to dance with the renowned Helena Markos Dance Co. The sheen very quickly begins to peel off the alluring exterior identity of the school and its staff, as Susie is pulled further into the darkness of what lies both literally and figuratively beneath the Helena Markos Dance Co.
Suspiria tries at every moment to actively repulse the viewer. It’s Guadagnino’s first soirée into body horror, a thread which can be followed through to Bones and All. And it’s a ruthless dissection of the power of the human body and how its potential can be utilised, by oneself, but also exploited by others. It takes the tried-and-true cultural shorthand of witchcraft, which the original Suspiria presents in a far more conventional sense, and pulls it apart until it loses any palatable reserve. There are numerous legitimately wince-inducing sequences, including a scene in the first act where dancer Olga is subject to one of the most heinous and unpleasant violent displays I have ever witnessed on screen. I was so sickened by it on my first viewing that in the multiple times that I’ve seen the it since my first viewing, I have not been able to watch the sequence again. With Guadagnino having such a grasp on realism and the authenticity of his storytelling removed from conventional cinematic trappings, it’s no surprise that when he turns his aim to horror, his gritty resulting depiction is bone-chillingly authentic in its masterful depiction.
So why is it then, that between the horrific exploits of this grim, bloody twist on a slasher which celebrates the most heinous of forces, it is so completely alluring? I find myself as entranced by it as those who witness the mesmeric dance rituals of the Helena Markos Dance Co. As we follow Susie’s journey towards unlocking her true destiny, through horror and a firm grasp of dread, the end result is incomprehensibly tragic and mellow, while also bizarrely uplifting. Our perception of heroes and villains is contorted until it completely falls apart and the ending, in its beastly, disturbing spectacle, is so utterly triumphant. We do not condemn the Dance co. For their grisly actions, in fact, we find ourselves enthralled in how cathartic their victory over virtue is.
The film, echoing Guadagnino’s entire catalogue, is a technical marvel and a visual feast which tenderly invites you to experience its brutality. It’s as off-putting as it is completely irresistible. It’s an endlessly rich text which I continue to discover new facets of with each viewing.
"I think they think we're weird."
"Does that bother you?"
In 2020, two years after he unleashed Suspiria, Guadagnino’s eight-episode original HBO miniseries, We Are Who We Are aired in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. Guadagnino’s first and thus far only expedition into television, which I have now seen three times in its entirety, remains one of the most challenging and singular texts I’ve encountered in my lifetime with media. It’s taken me years and all three watches to begin to fully parse through the deep intricacies of this coming-of-age mosaic of sexual development and identity politics.
Set on a US military base contrastingly positioned in another lush Italian landscape, a group of teenagers living on the base grapple with their complex and ever-changing relationships, turbulent emotions and sense of identity both personally and in how they present themselves outwardly. Precocious young protagonists Fraser and Caitlin, played by Jack Dylan Grazer and Jordan Kristine Seamón, are like two ferocious comets, drawn to each other like magnets from the first moment they lock eyes and destined to collide, offering each other a sense of understanding and belonging which neither had previously experienced. The eight-episode season begins as a tightly wound ball of repression and dense, obscured familial, friendship and sexual dynamics. There’s a harsh edge to it and it initially feels cold and difficult to access. But over the next handful of hours this slowly unravels, surrounding its characters in spools of their innermost fears and desires, wreaking destruction through relationships but also forming new ones so formidable.
In the ongoing theme of Guadagnino’s innate ability for discomforting realism, We Are Who We Are is a pointedly raw and thorny portrait of the teenage experience. Taking what he mastered with Elio in Call Me by Your Name, he infuses this into a more entangled and broader lens on a diverse group of young people whose expansive sense of self and individuality have been forced through the military complex and hammered into strict structures which they are desperate to overcome. Spanning one summer, but an entire life-cycle of adolescent development, it’s a tribute to both the agonizing confusion and the singularly freeing euphoria of being a teenager. Sprawling across multiple families and expanding its sense of an angst-ridden search for identity to the parents of the base as much as their children, its turbulence are consistently anchored by the tender devotion between Caitlin and Fraser which, like a torpedo, has the power to hurtle through every exterior factor attempting to keep them apart.
More than any of Guadagnino’s other work, its emotional motivations are incredibly dense, and as I said it has this sharp edge which can be quite off-putting. But there is vast tenderness to be uncovered beneath this if you’re willing to challenge yourself to uncover it. The final scene of the series is one of the most deeply touching and revelatory moments of depictions of human relationships in media that I’ve ever experienced. In one simple act of shifting a character dynamic, it reframes the entire series and transforms it into something completely different in front of your eyes. Without the trappings of coming-of-age stories which we have grown accustomed to, We Are Who We Are is, in my mind, about as good as depictions of teenagers can be. Call Me by Your Name is the more accomplished act of sheer beauty and unbridled poignancy, and it will always undoubtedly be my favourite Guadagnino. However, taking into context what the director’s broad aims seem to be across his body of work, I find it pretty difficult to argue that We Are Who We Are is not the magnum opus of everything he has set out to achieve.
"You don't think I'm a bad person?"
"All I think is that I love you?"
And so, this timeline of monumental outputs from the catalogue of Luca Guadagnino, which have shaped my creative and personal development immensely, leads us, now, to Bones and All. Two years on from the release of We Are Who We Are, after pandemic-induced delays, Luca serves up on a bloody platter, the brutal but devastatingly delicate and portrait of star-crossed teenage cannibals, which is perhaps the greatest convergence yet of the tender beauty of Call Me by Your Name, the dense psychological and moral explorations of We Are Who We Are and the twisted, carnal brutality of Suspiria.
Maren, played by the magnificent Taylor Russell, never knew her mother and was recently abandoned by her father upon turning eighteen. She also has had an insatiable compulsion to consume human flesh since before she can even consciously remember. Scraping her way across the Midwest, on her path towards finding her mother, she encounters other ‘eaters’ for the first time in her life, including the insidiously chilling Sully, played by Mark Rylance, but also the slick but quietly tender Lee, played to aching enigmatic perfection once more by Timothée Chalamet. Lee, who is as lost and lonesome as Maren is even if not immediately apparent, offers to accompany her on her quest. And as the pair embark on a safari of decaying rustic landscapes, love and yearning slowly bleed through the seams of their companionship, until the two are irrevocably bonded by an understanding and sense of belonging which neither of them have previously found from another person. Wrestling with the brutality of their actions and their unchangeable nature, the pair are forced to grapple with the burdens handed down to them from their parents and whether or not they will ultimately be consumed by them.
It’s an incredibly subtle period piece which plants itself in the 1980s without succumbing to romanticized and idealized, colourful 80s visual stereotypes. On a journey across state lines, it’s an exploration of the forgotten pockets of the rural Midwest. It’s a tribute to how utterly desolate and lonesome these vast open spaces of land are, which seem to stretch on for eternity. In the fringes of American society, Maren and Lee are so utterly anonymous, lost in a wasteland which has discarded them and finds it easier to pretend they don’t exist. They spend their lives desperately running away from something which they can never escape, however together they may finally be able to make comfortable acquaintances with.
There are a couple of obvious metaphorical inserts for what cannibalism represents in this film. Maren and Lee certainly, at times overtly, embody drug addicts. As Michael Stuhlbarg’s grimy and sinister eater Jake remarks to Lee; “you remind me of every junkie I’ve ever met." They are constantly grasping for their next hit in barren towns which, just off screen, are themselves being cannibalised by mass addiction and opioids. As Guadagnino charges through all of his work, as an openly gay man, there is also a queer coding to this story, regardless of the relationship at its centre not being a queer one. Not just from the more overt references like Lee’s sister telling him “you look like a fucking f*ggot in that shirt”, shame has been conditioned into Maren and Lee since they were born about an innate factor of themselves which was forced upon them, and which neither have the power to change. It is only through their relationship that they allow each other the safety and empowerment to embrace its carnal beauty as a formidable force which does not need to be understood to be accepted. And perhaps the most obvious comp, as previously alluded to, is parental trauma. Whether it’s Lee’s violent, alcoholic father or Maren’s psychotic mother who passed her cannibalistic nature down to her daughter, it’s a story about the ugliest of afflictions which is forced upon us by our parents when we are only infants, forced to bear the load of their diseases and carry them with us into adulthood.
Or, in a world where the elderly Sully lures young Maren into what she is unaware is a moment charged with intimacy, and then projects entirely one-sided, parasocial ideas of companionship onto her, resorting to the classic move of calling her a “c*nt” when she rejects him. In a world where an inebriated man harasses people at the grocery store in broad daylight, people leave their babies behind fire stations and the slaughterhouses have cafes, perhaps cannibalism here simply acts as a broader accumulation of the rotting, forgotten stretches of 1980s rural America where violence is rampant and ideological morality is scarce through poverty and right-wing politics. And the truth is that there is no answer as to which of these afflictions cannibalism was intended to be representative of because it’s all of these things. This world is slowly rotting around them and Maren and Lee, with only each other to cling on to, are desperately trying to not be consumed by the rot.
But through a slow and meandering love story where they are challenged by reflecting each of their most loathsome qualities back at each other, while offering each other the tender care and understanding they have been starved of, as Jake wryly says to Lee at a campfire; “maybe love will set you free”. Maren and Lee, after a lifetime of exterior and self-inflicted suffering, allow each other the release and chance to retain some of their innocence, Bones and All is Guadagnino’s perversely hopeful exhibit of how the purest form of innocence and love can be extracted from the ugliest and most hopeless of circumstances. Even more than Suspiria, it truly feels like Guadagnino pushing himself to the limits of how delicate and tender he can make something which in every conceivable way is barbaric. Yes, he inflicts twisted perversions on the audience which convey an all-consuming hopelessness. However, he also asserts, as he does through his entire body of work, that yes, love can set us free.
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