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It is very hard to describe the style of Luca Guadagnino, the director of Bones And All. His films are very good. But it seems like he is not interested in plot, which is weird, considering that the movies are good. He is famous for his erotic dramas, films centered around a sexual tension between people, like his perhaps most acclaimed movie Call Me By Your Name, in which all the substance comes from very subtle things. A character looks a certain way on another character. Or perhaps holds onto another character's hand for way too long. And you have to piece together all these little clues to even start feeling some kind of presence of a plot. Because if you don't pay attention it all looks like people just casually hanging out. And then suddenly a payoff happens, which would make sense only if you paid attention to the little clues.
In Bones And All he does something slightly different. The movie is still very much an erotic drama and it has a lot of subtlety. But it has a central concept that fills the screen with so much tension in every scene, that it's just amazing. As you probably already know the film is about two cannibals-lovers who go on a journey through the country. Which makes every shot of them even kissing a nightmarish horror-fest of absolute tension. Even if nothing is happening.
The direction of the movie is obviously very good. Luca Guadagnino shoots his movies with very precise camera. Nothing too fancy. Everything serves emotional purpose. He likes people to do things that would be in their character, but not necessarily important to the story, like dance. Which makes his editing very intuition-based and less clarity based. Which reminds the style of Lars Von Trier but not quite there. If there would be a scale between chaotic documentary style and a very precise and calculated cinematic style, Lars would be way closer to documentary than Luca. Luca is more in control, but lets a lot of character and intuition through. Which is very interesting.
The movie was filmed on 35 mm film, which gives it a very old school look that doesn't look like anything modern. Which may put off some people. But the movie is pretty to look at, even though most of it happens in very disturbing settings. Like apartments of very poor people with various layers of dirt. Or other unpleasant locations. But somehow Luca and the cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan pulled off making this ugly world pretty somehow.
There is quite a bit of shocking and violent imagery in the film. I mean of course. It is a horror film about cannibals. So you kind of get what you expect. But the director seem like wasn't that much interested in all the violence. So it plays when it needs to, but the focus of the story is on the characters and their relationships.
Acting-wise the movie kills it. Timothée Chalamet is very good as always. It's hard to think of him as an adult, because he looks 14. But he is older than me. And in this movie he has enough dirt on him to make him look more like an anorexic drug addict than a 14 year old. But he is supposedly way younger than himself in the movie. I would guess around 20. So his casting is nearly perfect. Along side him Guadagnino found another actress that is older than me and even older than Chalamet, and she plays an 18 year old. Her name is Taylor Russell and somehow both she and Chalamet just refuse to age, I guess. The movie also includes a rather unexpected role from Mark Rylance who plays nice and kind old men in Spielberg films. But here he plays a truly terrifying cannibal rapist.
One interesting face that I was not expecting to see was Jake Horowitz who plays a guy that gets eaten. The thing is, today I reviewed a movie where he is one of the lead actors called The Vast Of Night which was supposed to be this small self funded movie. But somehow the actor got to be in a Luca Guadagnino picture starring Timothée Chalamet.
Over all the movie is very dark, very tense, very scary and very emotional in the same time. When I saw it for the first time, I was so overwhelmed with emotions and it was so visceral that I remember having a near eye-opening experience. Like if I was spiritually changed by it. It was something.
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