Bones and All Review: Luca Guadagnino Slams Violence In The Face Of The Viewer That Is A Metaphor For Diversity
Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4.5/5 (for and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Finally, here is Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino’s film (Call me by your name) has landed on the Lido as a competition film for the 79th edition of the Venice film festival. Yesterday I saw the film and I can finally tell you about it without restrictions. Bones and All is a feature film that in terms of themes and tones differs completely from Call Me By Your Name, if you liked the film that launched Timothée Chalamet’s career you might not appreciate the new work of the Italian director.
Bones and All is gory, spares no splatter and violent scenes. For my personal taste, it is perhaps too pushed towards the horror genre. It is not a film suitable for an easily impressionable audience. The film uses cannibalism as a metaphor for extreme love, diversity and genetic diseases. A film that, despite the fusion of genres, preserves Guadagnino’s poetry. Timothée Chalamet is perfect, Taylor Russell a pleasant discovery. Here is the review from Bones and All.
Bones and All Review: The Story
If we had to summarize the plot of the film there would be very little to tell (and not that it is bad). Bones and All tells the story of Maren, a young 18-year-old girl who lives with her father until her cannibal drive, which has been dormant for some time, explodes again. Once they have escaped and found refuge in another American state, after a short time, her father will leave her daughter an audio cassette with the last message, a birth certificate and some money, abandoning her to her fate. Maren will thus begin a journey through rural America that will lead her to meet Lee, a reckless young man who – like her – has an unstoppable passion for human flesh. Between the two outsiders, there will be some tender.
We do not want to tell you more, both so as not to spoil the surprises that the film reserves, and because the main interest is to tell the plot thread that binds the two characters, and the public with them. Not a story of events, but feelings. Because, as we know, the pure development of the story is only the backbone of a story. The real meat, the juicy one, is given by emotions. The story is a real adventure between genres: Guadagnino ranges from road movie to horror to movies of love and personal growth. Bones and All is all of this and maybe even more, it’s impossible to pigeonhole it. I found it extremely fascinating that despite the incredible mix of genres the feature film manages to maintain an identity from start to finish. The story is neither fragmented nor inhomogeneous. Great credit for the company can be attributed to the director.
Luca Guadagnino conveys his poetics in every frame of Bones and All. The artist has managed to make a film poetic and exciting that uses cannibalism for almost its entire duration as an expedient to convey messages that have nothing to do with it. As I anticipated at the beginning, Bones and All proposes cannibalism as a cover to be exhibited on display and a tool to represent recurring themes in a different light. Bones and All tells of the marginalization due to diversity, loneliness and the possibility of changing the destiny that seems already sealed.
Bones and All Review and Analysis
If Bones and All works wonderfully, it is also due to the presence of some prominent personalities in a varied, but perfect cast. We want to quote Mark Rylance, in the role of a cannibal that Maren and Lee will meet along the way, able to play with the feelings towards the viewer: reliable but perverse, sweet but unpredictable, childish but slimy. A truly unforgettable character from the first viewing. Michael Stuhlbarg finds Guadagnino playing a decidedly rougher character than Elio’s father in Call Me By Your Name, an example of how much in this film the director wanted to give a characteristic, especially visual, trait to each character.
And this is how we come to talk about the protagonist couple. Of course, we cannot say anything about Timothée Chalamet that has not already been said in recent years. The young actor is perfectly at ease in the role of Lee, combining the fragility of childhood and adolescence with an adult bearing. The big revelation of Bones and All is, however, Taylor Russell, absolutely amazing in the way she moves, reacts, talks observes. An actress who seems born to show close-ups of her on the largest possible screen, and who contributes to the greatest extent to giving life to that empathic bond with viewers.
Cannibalism is a metaphor for being satisfied with love, eating and being eaten to become a single body comprising both. Maren and Lee are cannibals by nature, not by choice, and they can’t help but follow the instinct to be who they are. Like the last message recorded by Maren’s father, words imprinted on a tape can be interrupted but one is forced to listen. As well as the road that the two travel, without finding a real definitive home, without recognition (impossible) by the other members of the family. And as well as the indispensable action of looking and being looked at. To understand the other through the eyes and the reflections within them. Everything flows in time, the audio cassette, the road, the blood. The film stops doing it only in one last bucolic shot, perfect, which interrupts time. A kiss leaves a taste on the lips, which does not need words because the emotions are shown, but they are not described.
Guadagnino does not hide anything about the gruesome banquets, flooding the scene with blood, and showing torn strips of skin and limbs devoured to the bone. Voracious hunger is a metaphor for perceiving oneself as different, and inadequate, as many feel while sailing on sight in the sea of adolescence. However, if it is true that the director shakes with the images he creates, rubbing the screen and cleaning the screen from the guts, Bones and All seems to reveal little more than a languid love story. If nothing else, Chalamet confirms himself as an interpreter as young as he is capable of piercing the screen and his two steps with the equally excellent Russell largely hold up the scaffolding of the film’s romantic arc.
In the same way, Mark Rylance shows off yet another brilliant performance, giving face to an affable and disturbing character at the same time, among the most indelible presences of the film thanks above all to his action rather than to the writing, inserted by force in the adventure of the two protagonists. With Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino makes one of his most beautiful films (and one of the best seen so far in the competition in Venice 79): a love story on the road that focuses on emotions and understanding of the other. Set in the past but able to dialogue with today’s world, Bones and All is a refined hymn to love, with an extraordinary cast on which Taylor Russell stands out.
Bones and All Review: The Last Words
I conclude the review with my personal opinion. I find that Bones and All is a film that deserves to be seen for the time of experimentation and the ability to blend innovation and technical tradition, however, I do not deny that how the director has chosen to represent the main theme (cannibalism albeit used as a metaphor) is too strong in my weak eyes. The film does not belong to my comfort genre, I tried to separate personal tastes from objective quality as much as possible, and I hope I succeeded in the best possible way.
