ANDone of the most anticipated films, although it was out of competition, but 2025 is not a good vintage at Venice Film Festival For Luca Guadagnino, as indeed it was not even 2024 with Queer, while in 2022 – with Bones and All – the silver lion had won, making the protagonist Taylor Russell earn the Marcello Mastroianni prize for best emerging actress. Yet for After the Hunt He had two important axes in his sleeve: the protagonists, Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield (which – incidentally – will also be in the next project, Artificialon artificial intelligence).
Mysterious title
But let’s start from the title, which sounds a little mysterious. After hunting It is inspired by a phrase by Bismarck, the iron chancellor “:” people never lie as much as after a hunting trip, during a war or before an election “. To then move on to the titles of the head, so blatantly inspired by those of Woody Allen’s films that they have requested a long clarification – at the press conference – by the director.
“There is a canon with which I grew up, e When I started thinking about this film with my collaborators, we couldn’t stop thinking about Crimes and misdeeds, Another woman or Hannah and her sisters. There was an infrastructure in history that seemed connected to the great work of Woody Allen from 1985 to 1991. I played with that graphics and that font a couple of times in the past. And in any case it is now a classic that goes beyond him, “concluded earn a spicy thread.
The plot
Inspired by the script of Nora Garrett, an actress in the debut in this new guise, and set in Yale (perfectly reconstructed in the Studios of London), this “psychological thriller” opens with one of those evenings with a high rate of intellectuality that Woody Allen – in fact – knows how to narrate lightly and irony: in the elegant apartment of Alma (Roberts), a professor of philosophy waiting for Tenure (we would, in a nutshell, be the definitive role), and of the psychiatrist husband (Michael Stuhlbarg, former libertarian father of Timothée Chalamet in Call me by your name) There is discussion of ethics, generational differences, of breed discrimination, gender, class. With rain quotes by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger (“treated m. Hannah Arendt”), Freud (“was a misogynist”) …
Finished the party
Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield in “After the Hunt” (Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios. © All Rights Reserve).
Impossible to remember them all, but it certainly ends with the very Italian and very contemporary Giorgio Agamben and his Homo priest. Sovereign power and naked life (Einaudi). Ah, there is also an unsigned reference, in Truman Capote: “More tears are paid for the exuded prayers than for those not welcomed”.
In such an intelligent consent, forbidden to say discounted things, always provoke. And so a student of Takes the Brig to point out that – if Alma will have the Tenure At the expense of the best friend and professional competitor Hank (Garfield) – it will be precisely because he is a woman … and so on. After the party, the party for the sophisticated community of Yale really ends: The student “Cocca” of Alma (the Ayo Edibiri of The Bear) is reached home by the “Professor Garfield ‘, which the next day will accuse harassment. He immediately denies … how did it go? Where will the truth be? Slowly, other unconsciously removed secrets – or voluntarily hidden – will come to the surface …
Julia Roberts credible
Ulia Roberts in “After the Hunt” (Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios. © All Rights Reserve).
You will wonder about Julia Roberts … Yes, she manages to be – enough – credible in the role of Ambitian philosopher and woman; Garfield exceeds in histrionism, the student is unbearable from the beginning to the end and the only one who arouses sympathy is the psychiatrist husband (also great chef who, for consistency with the level of the environment, does not propose hamburger or pasta and tries into the cassoulet).
But Among the good reasons to see After the Hunt There is the soundtrack of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, on their fourth film with Guadagnino (“I consider them brothers, I love them and work with them is always a joy and a surprise”). This time they mixed John Adams and György Ligeti with Pietro Ciampi and It is precise to perdoar In the version of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cesária Evora and Caetano Veloso. Who lets you out of the cinema with the notes in the head, as happened in Challengers with Pechodalso of Caetano.