Hollywood is in a existential crisis due to lack of stars, but little by little a new generation begins to glimpse that can be the connection with the youngest audiences from here to the future. Timothée Chalamet aims to be one of them, although he is still in the process of maturing. For each ‘Call Me By Your Name’ or each ‘Dune’, a project is added to you where it is clear that he has not well measured what he can contribute to the group.
Probably one of his miscalculations was his meeting with the director who gave him one of the roles of his life, that of ‘Call Me By Your Name’. And it’s not that it looked bad on paper: a romantic criminal road movie with a terrifying component and youthful discovery. However, there are just too many things that don’t fit in a movie like ‘To the Bones: Bones and All’.
Broken hearts and bones
Luca Guadagnino takes us by the hand through deep America in this literary adaptation that could have been a cannibalistic ‘Twilight’, but instead creates something sensual although erratic. It is already available on Amazon Prime Video to see for yourself the difficulties and also the virtues that this film presents.
It’s not really Chalamet’s character who is the main protagonist, but Taylor Russell’s. The young woman has to escape and survive on the margins of society after the last incident where he has been unable to control his urge to eat human flesh. Along the way, he will meet other wandering souls who have the same cannibalistic desire, some better than others. The most fascinating will be a lonely young man with garish hair with whom she will maintain a romantic relationship.
The story takes place in the United States in the eighties, but It’s not a nostalgic movie at all.. Guadagnino uses President Ronald Reagan’s speech to comment on the failed promise of American prosperity to communities restricted to the margins of society. This has been interpreted as a validation of cannibalism by equating it with other oppressed communities such as LGTBI, which is terribly shallow reading that fails to grasp the most basic levels of reading subtext and media literacy.
‘Hasta los huesos: Bones and All’: lights and shadows
With complex and non-conformist issues like these, the Italian could have given a fascinating film that was also sensual and terrifying. But it only half complies, weighed down by an incomprehensible casting. Russell shines with his own light, being the film’s great find, but Chalamet doesn’t quite get the pulse of this direct heir to Martin Sheen’s character in ‘Bad Lands’. Other cannibals, such as Michael Stuhlbarg’s, help to convey some sought-after terrifying tension, but Mark Rylance’s, which seems to be taken from “Mabbles and Whispers: The Movie”, is just where the film bleeds.
And speaking of blood, the most gory parts are one of the successes of ‘Hasta los huesos: Bones and All’. Together with ‘Suspiria’, they show that Guadagnino could make a pretty chilling pure horror movie if he wanted to, using the visceral and breaking sounds to best displease the viewer. This means that the film is not completely wasted, but there is a constant feeling that it remains in the orbit of the awesome movie that could have been.
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