There is no way one can enjoy Luca Guadagnino’s seventh film Bones & All, unless one is a sucker for tortuous pain and violence. Although Luca has his Call Me By Your Name actor heartthrob Timothee Chalamet on board, there is none of the tenderness of the gay love story in this dark and reprehensible film about two human-eating youngsters on the run across the US.
Bones & All (the title refers to the ‘art’ of chewing on human flesh, like fish, bones and all) has a lot of passion. But not of the kind we saw in Call Me By Your Name. This is the variety of passion we would rather not be privy to, wherein we see Chalamet and his mysterious co-star Taylor Russell sink their teeth greedily into human flesh…
Are you disgusted by all this? So was I. Hang on. There is something deeply compelling about Guadagnino’s grisly gourmet. It mocks our sense of proprietary and questions our definitions of civil conduct. It extends our vision of aesthetic entertainment and challenges the conventional definitions of romance and road movies.
It’s also a deeply melancholic take on the isolation of the non-conformist. Lee (Chalamet) and Maren (Russell) are together, bonded by their love of human flesh, and yet they are apart. Maren’s nightmares could never be Lee’s, and vice versa. A traumatized childhood is seen to be responsible for the way the two protagonists have turned out. If only!
The explanations for their eccentric eating habits are at best, perfunctory. Do we really believe that Maren and Lee are casualties of their past? Is that what David Kajganich’s screenplay wants us to believe?
Another deep flaw in the screenplay is the casualness with which one cannibalistic protagonist connects with another. Within fifteen minutes of leaving home, Maren meets two of her flesh-eating kind (or ‘eaters’ as they call one another). Are we to believe the world is full of such culinary aberrant behaviour?
Director Guadagnino seems to believe the details lie in the devil. He juices the inner demons of his protagonist to draw out the worst side of the human personality. At times this film, fetishizing flesh-eating, is hard to consume. Chalamet and Taylor are shown ritualistically consuming human flesh with telltale blood smeared on their mouths. They sometimes seem like two brats who have just stolen mom’s freshly baked chocolate cake from the kitchen. More often than not, they strike us as objects of pity rather than disgust.
Chalamet who was sensational in Call Me By Your Name has not grown as an actor. He is still playing variations of the little-boy-‘lust’ character. Taylor Russell is riveting even when she is devouring human flesh. But the bone-chilling actor in this film is the incredible Mark Rylance who plays a cross between a cannibal and a psychopath as though to say there is a very thin line dividing the two.
I still don’t know why Luca Guadagnino made this film. For all its darkly striking achievements it is a film that just didn’t need to be made. Unless Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name hero Armie Hammer’s real-life cannibalise texts fired the director’s imagination.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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