“骨头,”卢卡Guadagnino加入一个小鬼ressive list of filmmakers from other parts of the world (Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders, John Woo) who bring fresh looks at genres and our national character when they come to work in America.
In the case of this cannibal road movie, it’s not a pun to say that there are tender insights amid unnerving suspense served with graphic gore.
Italian director Guadagnino — whose body of work ranges from multilingual features such as“Call Me by Your Name”and “A Bigger Splash” to the HBO miniseries “We Are Who We Are” and the Ferragamo documentary “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” — said he waited until the right project came along before making his move across the Atlantic. His longtime screenwriter David Kajganich’s adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ YA novel did the trick.
Guadagnino’s “Call Me” heartthrob Timothée Chalamet and Canadian actress Taylor Russell signed on to play the flesh-eating couple, and the film — which opens Friday, Nov. 18 — was shot on downscale locations from Ohio to Nebraska.
“How to see the landscape of America came naturally with David’s script,” Guadagnino, clad in a trippy orange flower-print jacket, said during a video interview with The Chronicle. “These characters go through a journey in the Midwest of the 1980s, in search of their own selves and trying to run away from who they are, maybe succeeding through the other’s gaze. I felt those elements could make me, in the most immediate and humble way possible, see this amazing country that is America.”
The urge to chew on their fellow humans is presented as a compulsion shared by Russell’s teenage Maren and Chalamet’s slightly older Lee, as well as a few others the young woman meets — such as Mark Rylance’s supremely creepy Sully — as she seeks to understand her disease/weakness/addiction. Lee and Maren repeatedly flee from both terrifying acts they commit and threats to their own bodies and souls. Don’t call “Bones” an outlaw-couple-on-the-run movie, though.
“It’s not like ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ or ‘Sugarland Express,’ ” Guadagnino clarified. “Society is not chasing these people. They actually are at the extreme margin of society; nobody sees them — they’re invisible.”
If overcoming her urges is not an option, Maren wants a moral framework to govern them. Russell’s performance, which earned her the Venice Film Festival’s best young actor award, is incredibly complex and poignant in this regard.
“她可能是任何年龄,but very smartly the story has Maren dealing with this as she’s coming to the end of her teenagehood,” the 28-year-old Russell, all but devoured by an oversize leather jacket, said in a separate video interview. “She has to make some concrete choices about what she’s going to do next and who she’s going to be. That’s obviously something a lot of teenagers are thinking about with all of the pressures of the world today: having to be successful by a certain age, all of these money worries we have now.
“Obviously, it’s not the same for Maren — she has her own afflictions — but the connectivity is that you wonder if you can live in a way that’s sustainable. That theme within oneself and reflected in the environment is ever present.”
Sounds serious. Yet Russell reported that the production had its unexpectedly playful moments.
“Funnily enough, a lot of the eating sequences were actually the lightest things that we filmed,” Russell (“Escape Room,” Netflix’s “Lost in Space”) recalled. “People laugh at you when you’re covered in fake blood, and there was an element of play that manifested on those days. We had incredible (visual effects)and makeup teams; it really was a joy to do, and fun!”
Though his 2018“Suspiria”was a remake of one of Italian giallo horror cinema’s classics, the director claimed that despite its ghoulish goings-on, “Bones and All” is no gross-out thriller.
“We tried to be endearing with the characters and their behavior,” Guadagnino noted. “We didn’t want to go for the shock value at all. It was more about these people have this condition, they have to, as they say, feed themselves. How can we make that bebehavioristicalmore than genre-driven? I was more interested in how the experience of fighting their own natures transformed these characters in the quest they’re going through.”
So, metaphor for addiction? Transgression? Alienation? All of the above?
“I was thinking about Maren in my own way, but the brilliance of film is that we kind of copy-and-paste things in our lives to what it could mean,” Russell said. “For sure, it is allegorical in that sense and it could mean anything. Some people were just saying to me that they connected with its similarity to growing up and being sexualized as a woman and not really understanding how and why. Also adoption, immigration, queerness, addiction—all of these things that are different from one another, but the similarity is that it feels like the world seems to separate (them).”
As for being lost in America, Guadagnino somehow transferred what he saw while working in the U.S. into his not quite a horror movie about people struggling to not eat their fellow citizens.
“How can I put it without sounding arrogant? I’ve seen the heartbreak of a society that is built upon neoliberalism,” the director said, with palpable anguish, of the globalized capitalism that has been in ascendance for decades. “That believes in this blind, brutal force that destroys everything that cannot stay up to its standards and leaves people behind. And yet, those people who are left behind in these places that have been impoverished have the most beautiful sense of community, openness and welcoming that they could. They still believe in what is in your Declaration of Independence, which is the pursuit of happiness. I found this very touching. It’s a beautiful country, and it’s a heartbreaking country.”
“Bones and All”(R) opens in select theaters Friday, Nov. 18, expands Wednesday, Nov. 23.