There are loves that consume everything, devouring loves. The one that Maren and Lee experience is like that. Literally. Thus, like Bonnie and Clyde before them, the two young people travel the secondary roads of America sowing death in their path. Except that Maren and Lee do not inflict bullet wounds: rather, they indulge their cannibalistic instincts.
In Bones and All (VF), Luca Guadagnino combines the horror of his previous Suspiria to the first outbursts of the heart of Call Me by Your Name (call me by your name). The result fascinates, revolts and captivates.
Moreover, the Italian filmmaker teams up again here with his revelation of Call Me by Your Name, Timothée Chalamet, who embodies Lee with the perfect blend of surface flippancy and underlying vulnerability. The real protagonist, however, is Maren, whose point of view the film follows from start to finish. She, so memorable in the film wavesby Trey Edward Shults, Taylor Russell shines again, judiciously minimalist in her playing and wildly charismatic.
The film is based on a novel by Camille DeAngelis published in 2015, and adapted by David Kajganich, collaborator of Luca Guadagnino for A Bigger Splash (By the swimming pool ; a remake of The swimming pool by Jacques Deray) and Suspiria (remake of the cult film by Dario Argento). The story begins with the quest for the origins – and for himself – of Maren, whom her father abandons without warning on the morning of her 18th birthday. Exhausted from having to watch over his daughter, who is prone to cannibalistic cravings, he left.
So here is Maren on the trail of her mother, who mysteriously left when she was just a baby.
One day, she crosses paths with Lee. Without saying a word, they recognize each other, “sniff” each other: they are hungry for the same thing. From then on, but without ever neglecting Maren’s intimate investigation, the film evolves into a tale of criminal lovers evoking not only the already mentioned Bonnie and Clydeby Arthur Penn, but also Badlands (The wild ride), by Terrence Malick.
The film is set in the early 1980s, in the early days of the Reagan era, when the gap between rich and poor was only growing: this is not trivial. Fact, Bones and All, who marauds in desolate lands and stays on the outskirts of big cities without venturing there, portrays characters who have nothing: neither income nor roof. They only have themselves.
They live on love and fresh flesh, slaughtering, gutting and then devouring unlucky people whose remains allow Maren and Lee to appease their monstrous appetites.
In this regard, Lee confides that they have no choice in the matter, that they need to satisfy this “addiction”. Consequently, to the metaphor of social inequities is added that of drug addiction.
Poetry and gore
Winner of the Silver Lion in Venice, Guadagnino’s staging, with its harsh, impressionist poetry, deliberately calls to mind that of Malick in Badlands: slightly faded colors, abundance of “ lens flare » retro (these luminous halos which cross the image)… Here and there, however, the dread insinuates itself with an incredible strike force.
In this case, it may just as well be a passage devoid of violence, as when Maren and Lee meet two sinister travelers (director David Gordon Green and actor Michael Stuhlbarg, the father in Call Me by Your Name), than a sequence where eroticism and death rub shoulders, like when Lee kills in the middle of a cornfield a showman he has seduced under the greedy – and lustful – gaze of Maren.
Impossible, moreover, to ignore this meeting between Maren and an old cannibal (Mark Rylance), as well as this anxiety-provoking reunion between the first and her mother (Chloë Sevigny, with a preliminary visit to the grandmother played by Jessica Harper, star of Suspiria of 1977).
All this to say that the horror in Bones and All is based as much on an agonizing atmosphere as on flashes of gory that George A. Romero would not deny (the bloody special effects are of a staggering tactile and sticky realism). We are miles away from the sunny and bucolic atmosphere of Call Me by Your Nameor the elegant Viscontian opulence of I Am Love (Love): it is extended, the register of Luca Guadagnino.
As often with the filmmaker on the other hand, the amorous languor translates into a rhythm, yes, languid, and in this case, the last act stretches unduly. Nevertheless, these are cannibalistic loves that we are not about to forget.