Cannibal Chalamet for Guadagnino, the bitter tale of Tori and Lokita: films not to be missed at the cinema and in streaming

Ultra pop, borderline, ethically crumbling. Having overcome the dismay and horror, the hurricane film by Luca Guadagnino Bones and All, taken from the novel by Camille De Angelis, deserves a separate discussion. It is an event, without a doubt. Star event, for the presence in the cast of Timothe Chalamet, the revelation Taylor Russell and the veteran Mark Rylance. Media event, because Guadagnino’s films from Call me by your name onwards are never insignificant. Event tout courtbecause the theme, Bonnie and Clyde cannibals, leads to the edge of cinema, to the extreme metaphor, bringing together themes such as the existential precariousness of the new generations, the consequent need for affection, the degeneration of behaviors, the natural instincts to dominate. Where the meaning of emancipation, male and female, becomes kill the father and eat him.
Dantesque ballad with splatter inserts, Bones and All helped by the news: just mention the case of Armie Hammer, one of Guadagnino’s favorite actors, accused of cannibalism and forced to isolate himself in the Cayman Islands. The title alludes to the complete meal of the anthropophagus: down to the bones, then the peak of pleasure is reached. Guadagnino has the courage to confront himself in terms of road movie horror with the cinema of monsters to tell a love story very sick between two tender, bruised boys from the American province, wounded by deep traumas, unable to react to the evil they carry within, condemned to a path that smacks of Shakespearean tragedy and, it soon becomes clear, it will not lead to anything good.
The cannibals, it seems, are a fluid community, without apparent traces. They can be recognized from a distance by their smell, a mixture of mud, metal and blood. Maren (Taylor Russell), 18, one of them. Her mother, similar to her, abandoned her as a child and now lives, we will find out later, in an asylum on the other side of America. fleeing his own evil nature in the country of Reagan hedonism. He tries to resist, but when the fatal impulse comes it becomes a fury. Running away, she believes she can find shelter, redemption, hope.
Instead, fate puts her in front of Sully (Rylance), an elderly television repairman and insane eater with Cheyenne braid. He says: I try not to kill. Instead, in the upstairs bedroom he has a hot meal served. Maren keeps her distance but gives in to the invitation and the night gives way to a dawn of horror.
The little one runs away again, despite the big man trying to hold her back and then chasing her. In his path stands Lee (Chalamet), obsessed with his sister, with a drunken and abusive father. Immediate contact, but the distractions are many. The two set off, they devour, meet other cannibals, find a gay victim, with family and children, try to recover the roots. They even come to a kind of happiness, but Sully’s return to the scene sets the clock back to zero.
Guadagnino develops the story with an emotional precision that makes the film a once-in-a-lifetime experience and on the other a test of survival even for people with strong stomachs. radical, knows how to move and startle. Up to transforming the extreme code of history into an expressive element. Bones and All Not Twilight And sometimes he limps and ends up mistaking romanticism for nonconformity. The couple alternates between tenderness and ferocity, wallowing in blood, giving in to temptations, seeking saving contacts, prisoners of a solitude that resembles our world on the brink of madness. All explicit, undone, hopeless. Sure, make us feel sorry for a cannibal a result that only a champion like Guadagnino could achieve.

BONES AND ALL by Luca Guadagnino
(Italy-USA, 2022, duration 130′)
Starring Timothe Chalamet, Taylor Russell, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, Andr Holland, Chlo Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper
Rating: *** out of 5
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