All In
Luca Guadagnino, the maestro of feverish, tortured romance, taps his recent dip into horror in a gauzy YA cannibal love story. aaaah, youth!
Bones and All
Director: Luca Guadagnino • Writer: David Kajganich, based on the book by Camille DeAngelis
Starring: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, Jessica Harper, Michael Stuhlbarg, David Gordon Green
Italy / UK / USA • 2hrs 10mins
Opens Hong Kong November 24 • III
Grade: B
I’m going to say it right now: There will be no Armie Hammer comments in the following text. Nope. Not going there.
But it’s kind of hard, given that cannibals are having a moment. Beyond the documentary series on Hammer (House of Hammer), there’s the Jeffrey Dahmer Netflix series, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, hints of it in last year’s low-key hit Yellowjackets, a great deal of cannibalistic mystery around the forthcoming The Menu, all kicked off by Julia Ducournau’s Raw in 2016. Well there’s no hinting about it in Luca Guadagnino’s gauzy Bones and All, a “teen” YA romance about an outsider-y high school girl, Maren Yearly (28-year-old Taylor Russell, Escape Room), and the drifter-ish Lee (26-year-old Timothée Chalamet, The French Dispatch), who meet, connect and bond over their shared sense of un-belonging due to the fact that they’re both “eaters”: cannibals. In adapting Camille DeAngelis’s YA novel, Guadagnino strips out the novel’s alleged feminist elements and sticks to the isolation, moral dilemma and classic “No one understands me!” themes of young lovers on the lam stories – most of which trade in the same ideas.
Admittedly Guadagnino has a certain light touch around burgeoning, fevered youthful sexuality, the first blush of romance and so on. If you didn’t get that from Call Me By Your Name (also starring Chalamet and, erm, gulp, Hammer) you weren’t paying attention. He does it again here, when lonely Maren, invited to a slumber party by one of the cooler girls at school, cosies up to her during a particularly estrogen-fuelled make-over. A few tentative seconds of what looks like sapphic attraction degrades into something akin to body horror when Maren’s compulsion overcomes her and she eats the girl’s finger. Nonetheless those few seconds were sweet.
How very Badlands
Addressing Maren’s cannibalistic tendencies immediately – she and her father Frank (André Holland, Moonlight) hit the road inside of three minutes after Maren falls off the human flesh wagon and start all over again in another podunk town – frees up Guadagnino and writer David Kajganich (who also penned the director’s strongest recent work, A Bigger Splash and Suspiria) to get right to the coming-of-age road tripping horror. Bones and All is one of Guadagnino’s most derivative films: it trades in genre mash-up like Near Dark (the vampire western) and Warm Bodies (the zombie romance), and tosses in the cautious affection of Queen & Slim and the tonal beats of the mother of all misunderstood youth finding themselves interstate dramas, Terence Malick’s Badlands. DOP Arseni Khachaturan’s warm, naturalistic images sit in aggressive contrast to the visceral gore of Maren and Lee’s exploits. Still, the focus is on the unspoken, kind of bittersweet connection between the two, even when they’re gazing at each with with human hair between their teeth.
Following the incident at the slumber party, Frank throws in the towel and abandons Maren with a bit of cash, a cassette tape – it’s the mid-1980s at the height of the Reagan years when his promised trickle-down wealth never materialised, not an issue Guadagnino really interrogates – explaining his actions and her birth certificate. It prompts her to go looking for her birth mother, and maybe get some answers about her desire to eat people. Along the way she meets Sully (Mark Rylance), the world’s creepiest Swiss tinker, who comes back to haunt her, a pair of menacing weirdos, Jake and Brad (Michael Stuhlbarg and Halloween director David Gordon Green) and a carnival worker (Jake Horowitz). Each encounter pulls Maren and Lee closer to each other, and sends Maren farther down an ethical rabbit hole.
Worst. Tinker. Ever
Not Deliverance, but close
There might have been something to Bones and All if there had been more meat on the bones (sorry). As it stands, it’s an achingly familiar story about two outsiders who find each other and a sliver of happiness before meeting a tragic end, played with such subtlety as to come very close to inert. We don’t really learn anything about Maren and Lee in the way we learnt oodles about Tilda Swinton’s Marianne Lane and Ralph Fiennes’s Harry Hawkes in A Bigger Splash, and nothing really seeps below the surface the way Suspiria’s looming power dynamics and motherhood seeped into that film. Russell is suitably conflicted and unsure on her feet but if her trip with Lee and her run-ins with oddballs like Sully taught her anything we don’t know it. Chalamet falls back on his ultra-brooding, super-emo persona here, the one that worked for Paul Atreides moody teen ruler in Dune. He’s still not much of a bad boy, though he’s got a bit more swagger than he’s displayed in the past (cough, The King, cough). The closing frames aim for poetry but fall a little short. Perhaps the inherent drama of being 15 years old would help, and would make the literally all-consuming first love more resonant. — DEK