Bones And All
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Running time: 2hr10 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet star in Bones and All
In some ways, America isn’t so much a country as it is a brand, and nothing is so central to that brand as the freedom of the open road, the chance to discover or remake yourself through travel. Stick in one place and you can get stuck in other ways, arrested in your development as a person. That’s the theory, anyway.
The American road trip offers two lovers the chance to escape the self, in Luca Guadagnino’s new film, Bones And All, which is set across the American Midwest in the 1980s. The lovers in question are Maren (Taylor Russell), a young woman left to fend for herself by her father the moment she turns 18, and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a tough but tender outsider grappling with an initially unspoken shame. It’s ostensibly more Maren’s story than it is Lee’s, but there is a strong sense of a wounded, incomplete person about her, and it makes sense that when she meets Lee, they cling to each other like a pair of drowning swimmers; it’s the story of a couple even when that story is told through absence.
The film is at its most compelling when it gives itself over to pure atmosphere, becoming a cinema of mood and imagery, some of it disturbing, some of it luscious. Chalamet has one of the great faces in film right now, all hawkish eyebrows and marble cheekbones. He alternates skilfully between a tentative vulnerability and the sly, bad boy persona that Lee has developed to protect himself. He wears his proto-grunge ripped jeans like armour, a way of advertising his street smarts, and Russell matches him with a watchful wariness. Despite their best efforts, there is an obvious fragility to both these misfits.
But neither is as helpless as they might seem. Their outsider status, and ostensible reason for their cross-country odyssey, is that both are “eaters”, driven to consume human flesh in order to survive. The film isn’t particularly interested in recycling the same old metaphors between sex and the consumption of flesh, which is refreshing. The lovers’ hunger here functions as a locus of shame and compulsion, a reason that these two are bound together on the margins, but it isn’t the key to their entire identity, a bit like how Bonnie And Clyde isn’t really about guns as a particular item of hardware.
That doesn’t mean the scenes of cannibalism aren’t vivid and arresting — they are — but they aren’t sex-substitutes, and only one murder is sex-adjacent. The eating of people here has more do with an act of nihilism, or total obliteration, of consuming every last piece of who and what someone was, as the title has it, bones and all. It’s an evocative title, shared by the YA novel by Camille DeAngelis on which regular collaborator David Kajganich’s script is based, but curiously, the book doesn’t make very much of this appealing phrase (it doesn’t appear once in the text of the novel), which feels like a bit of an unfulfilled promise. Guadagnino’s film makes good on it, exploring the concept in a little bit more detail: what could it mean, what might be the appeal or the horror of being utterly obliterated? There’s a piquant pleasure in all of this being tackled from within something which — rather like its protagonists — is disguised as a dreamy teen romance, but which conceals something more monstrous, braiding flashes of nightmarish violence into a rather lovely and elemental expression of the desire to lose yourself.
BONES AND ALL (2022) Written by David Kajganich, based on the book by Camille DeAngelis | Shot by Arseni Khachaturan | Edited by Marco Costa
Screened in Competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival
