Fine Young Cannibals

Bones and All (2022) - Guadagnino Guadagnino's new film, based on YA novel, Bones and All, shows he might be the personification of a tribute band in a filmmaker form. It doesn't matter how technically impressive your guitar riff is at Black Dog, you are no Jimmy Page. After attempting to contextualize Dario Argento's camp classic Suspiria with serious pomp, A Bigger Splash, a La picine remake, with lesser results, Guadagnino is at it again with this American YA novel adaptation and pulls influences from every direction and packages it as Terence Malarkey Americana.

Here, cannibals equal vampires or werewolves or zombies. Maren (Taylor Russell) is a high schooler with a secret. And that secret is revealed at a girl’s sleepover (is it middle school or high school?) when she sneaks out from her dilapidated home, proving that her overly protective father (André Holland)'s concern. She has an insatiable hunger for human flesh. This also explains why they have been traveling all around, never stick to one place to settle, always on the edge of abject poverty. Soon father abandons her, leaving her with some money and her birth certificate and a cassette tape explaining what she is.

Soon she finds a fellow cannibal in the form of an older eccentric man, Sully (Mark Rylance). Who says he can smell a fellow cannibal from miles. This is Maren's first realization that there are others like her out there. But Sully seems too creepy to stick around with. Traveling all over Mid-West, looking for mom who might hold the key to her existence, she meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a charming grocery store clerk who happens to be a cannibal too and they become traveling companion.

Michael Stuhlbarg, David Gorden Green show up as fellow hick cannibals. Jessica Harper also has a role as grandma. And unfortunately, Chloë Sevigny seems stuck on playing a crazy mom character, forever. Rylance is, as always, so dependable a character actor, he steals the show, playing truly creepy adversary to the young lovers who are trying to have a go at being regular people. Chalamet is always the same. Riding his boyish charm and nonchalance, attracting attention from both sexes. And a forever boy who is super awkward at playing a grownup. Russell is very good as a young woman on the path of self-discovery and finding true love.

So, what is Bones and All about? Why is it set in 90s? The more you think about the film, there is nothing really you can hold on to and less you like it. 'True love needs to be consumed bones and all' is too much of an emo song lyric to be taken seriously. Is this about Gen-Xer's rejection of the Boomers? Is this about consumerism? Or is this some silly teen romance with pacing problems? Either way, it's so skin-deep.

Animis Suspirium

Suspiria (2018) - Guadagnino

*Adendum:
I take back everything I said below. Suspiria, as Guadagnino imagined, has a long lasting power than I ever dreamed of. And I too hastily judged upon its initial viewing. The delicate details of the period, the mood which is quite different from the original, has it's own place and power. Even have grown to love the Thom Yorke soundtrack. The ending I hated at first, but upon repeated viewing, it has certain operatic grandeur to it as Susie fully embraces her role as the Mother. Sodden, grotesque and beautiful.

It's a mess. It's sad that this is the state of what passes as arthouse cinema nowadays. I didn't like Guadagnino's much phrased I am Love. Had no desire to see his remake of Le Picine, Bigger Splash, or Call Me by Your Name. This overwrought, over-serious and over-long take on Dario Argento's chinzy classic of the same name gets almost everything wrong.

We get to know Susie Banyon (Dakota Johnson) fresh from Ohio farmland as she travels to always rainy, still divided Berlin, to audition for a Martha Grahamesque modern dance school. It is 1977, same year as the initial release year of the original. But this doesn't mean that they have to contextualize anything- and they do the hell out of it- Baader Meinhoff, RAF terrorists bombings and hijacking of the airplane and all that - both on the street and on TV and radio. But only on the surface level though. AND BECAUSE IT'S GERMANY, you have to have a concentration camp story. So Ohio and Mennonites background gets lost in the shuffle, even though Susie is supposed to be the chosen one. And because Guadagnino is buddy buddy with Tilda Swinton, she has to play two very different roles unnecessarily.

Thai cinematographer/Weerasethakul's regular Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's sudden zoom-ins and busy camera movement are a total mismatch. Worse are distracting editing and terrible in camera effects. Worst is Thom Yorke's soundtrack which comes across as completely inappropriate for the material. Too bad because Johnson, Mia Goth and Swinton are all wonderful in their respective roles. There are some great visual moments -especially the eerie dream sequences and dance numbers. But the ending resembles later period Argento level of terribleness. I mean, it's From Dusk 'til Dawn bad. Wow, I mean, terrible. Guadagnino is not the knight of Shining Armour for the future of arthouse cinema. Get that in to your head.

Tilda Swinton Show

I Am Love (2009) - Guadagnino

The film is an elaborate, visually elegant melodrama set in Milan. It tells the fall of the Recchi family, of textile fortune. Starts with the patriach(grandpa Recchi)'s birthday dinner in an opulent mansion where grandpa announces his retirement and leaves the company in the hands of his son Tancredi and grandson Redo (you will need two to replace me!). Tancredi's elegant Russian wife Emma (Tilda Swinton) is smitten by Antonio, a chef friend of her son Redo's. Tancredi is a ruthless businessman who is unafraid of laying off workers or selling the company to the highest bidder, while Redo falls on the sensitive side of the family, along with his artistic, burgeoning lesbian sister Ellis (Alba Rohrwacher, sister of Alice I found out).

It's a complete Tilda show though. Including Emma, every character is very lightly sketched out and two dimensional. But who wouldn't want to see Tilda speaking Italian and Russian and looking chic for two hours? The movie is truly a director's film, it's all about meticulously choreographed swishing tracking shots and movement and editing. There is a rhythmic, fluid quality in Guadagnino's sumptuous filmmaking, reminiscent of Bertolucci and the 70s Italian cinema. The tragedy strikes the Recchis brought upon by Emma's affair with the young chef and the film builds up to virtuosic, heartpounding climax. Too bad that small gestures and subtlties of characters get lost in all the grand technical prowess.