gthem years of Bones and all it’s the eighties of Demons (the decade of the horror boom), but Timothee Chalamet and Tyler Russell they are not the victims of a contagion, they were born cannibals without being beasts. They live with instinct, sometimes they control it and sometimes they don’t. And yet another accident – a snack with the friend’s finger – some parents who can’t take it anymore to change city and house, run away. Not before leaving a tape with all of it who knows about the strange appetite.
This is the case with Maren’s father (Tyler), who thus forces the girl to look for her mother, who disappeared when she was little – in book of the same name from which the film is based, the opposite happens. Furthermore: Is she the only cannibal or is there a brotherhood? Do cannibals feed on each other?. The journey through rural America, with a few dollars and a lot of hunger, which began solo then becomes a couple when he meets Lee (Chalamet)who however still maintains a (very bad) bond with the family.
Bones and allplot of love and identity
In Italy for a round of interviews and a Milanese premiere whose red carpet was canceled for too many fans, Chalamet has pointed out several times as the desolate landscape that Tyler and Lee move throughseek refuge and identity, both that of Reaganomicsthe economic strategy of the then president Ronald Reagan which impoverished deep America. It’s true, but it’s a political fact that you don’t read in the film.
THE Joy Division and the New Orders in the soundtrack, the maps and the telephone directories, yes it’s the eighties, but the evocation is light, dreamy. They represent more of an archaic, primitive background on which to focus on the union and contradictions of Maren and Lee. The first most willing to understand, to have scruples, to feel disgust at the idea of living up to 70 years on the run and with a string of bodies behind it bitten; the second already fatalistic: “There is nothing to understand about our nature, that’s the way it is.”
This nothingness, in which two unfortunates try to build a normality, or to barricade themselves – like vampires Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston from Only the lovers survivecould afford a home and a chest freezer –, Luca Guadagnino he says it lightly, without rhetoric and virtuosity. With a certain fixity from automatic registration. Almost it was just a question of following the boys on the road. To open the field of view of the naive paintings that open the opening credits: in fact, Maren appears under the shape of a trellis.
Timothee Chalamet and Tyler Russell. (Vision Distribution)
A mid-air pattern that reduces climax and sentimentality, saving even on the gore splatter, perhaps not so much if the news of cases of people passing out on the scenes of cannibalism arrive from the cinemas. Certainly for everything Sully does and says, a Mark Rylance absolutely lynchano that he feels Maren’s presence and teaches her to feast on a corpse. And then for the creepy appearance of Michael Stuhlbarg – Elio’s father in Call me by your name – in the perverted role of a styled hillbilly A quiet weekend of fear.
Timothée and Tyler, very good bewildered
But Bones and all it is not hhereditarythere are no grimaces, contortions, inhuman screams, supernatural and plot holes that will open up a pieces about the meaning of the film. It tells a love story between two young people who they have an alternative idea of a main dish – two that look like the members secondary to a rock bandthe silent ones behind the frontman and then at the end of the concert with blood dripping from his mouth to his clothes from a fist fight.
Timothée and Tyler (Marcello Mastroianni Award at the Venice Film Festival 2022) they are very good as goggleswe love these two unripe, homeless, depressed-chic living people very much in grunge style. Fashionistas in spite of themselves. Even if it were only for the fact that they don’t tinker with smartphones, what is actually more castrating for romanticism than a director who concentrates on text messages. Fashion knows this very well, stealing a great deal from the analogue past.
Yet, Guadagnino, who has shot many commercials commissioned by important brandsin Bones and all he is concerned only with being a radical observer. Therefore he doesn’t bring a European idea to America, he lets himself be invested by the encounter. He takes it beautifully. However, in the story of Maren and Lee, he speaks of black and tragic melodrama from the old continent, from Heathcliff and Catherine to Romeo and Juliet. People who – it should be remembered – she didn’t part with a press release drafted by the lawyers.
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