Tag: Luca Guadagnino

Suspiria 

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s big clit vs small dick energy in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria, an aesthetic update of the original by turns confounding and magical – that neon soaked Argento look is replaced by the muted palette and instagram friendly architectural design/framing of Guadagnino. There’s enough glass brick on display to make you think twice about throwing stones, and enough conflicting, contradictory messages by this movie to have you frustrated, stupefied and eager to come back for more.

Dakota Johnson is the young American gone to Berlin to join a ballet troupe. We already know that her predecessor, played by an energetic Chloe Grace Moretz, has disappeared after ranting about a cult of witches, but rumour bounds that she has joined The Baader-Meinhof group. Johnson, shy but talented, finds more than just herself. There is, of course, some madness lurking in the halls of the Markos Dance Academy.

But there’s fairly little DNA shared with the Argento original. A fondness for split-focus dioptre shots aside, the closer comparative point is Possession, that masterpiece of writhing bodies in Berlin. That’s because Suspiria is far less interested in copying the emotions of the original than it is with taking a few of the themes and ideas (particularly that of displacement and cultism) through a modern lens. There have been countless comparisons to Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) Which need to stop right here. Aronofsky’s edgelord antics mistake intensity with psychological intimacy. Guadagnino has far more control, each shot is charged and every cut purposeful. It’s a high style, high energy film that confounds genre, rebukes narrative threading, and is a far more exciting, bewitching film for it.

Everyone in Suspiria is in a cult. Whether it’s the Mennonite community Johnson comes from, the dance crew, the coven of witches, the terrorist cells in the background, noisily grabbing our attention, or the weight of a Nazi history that oppresses the characters, the cast is divided into cliques. Guadagnino wants to know how these interact, and whether they define us. That’s why the Berlin setting is integral, and why close ups of stamps on passports or on train lines, contain a communicative power that might catch you off guard.

Suspiria is fascinated by lines of communication and travel, about what throbbing power comes from within. That’s his egotistical flourish. The director speaks to us through these lines: love me, appreciate me. We’re all sort of in the Guadagnino cult no matter where you stand on the man’s work. I’ve always found him a difficult filmmaker, one in thrall to auteurism who uses his influences (especially the Italian New Wave and Rohmer) as a shorthand to Arthouse success. Art is always political for Guadagnino, who here uses dance like Call Me By Your Name (2017) used archaeology, or A Bigger Splash (2016) used music. To allow the character to visually express their soul. But here, he finds a groove by speaking almost directly to us. It is his dance, precise and cut in service of the story.

This is a guy who used the lush setting of his gay Merchant Ivory pastiche as an excuse to ogle the young women on the film’s periphery. It’s hard to buy him as more interested in women’s’ stories than his own. “I’m the hands” Mother Suspirium says. A vision of feminine oneness is all that the film can tentatively explore, the story representing a vague return to a more primal, earth mother vision of femininity. As the faculty and students celebrate around a vast dinner table in a cafe dressed as though Parisian (simulacrum comes up again and again), Tilda Swinton and Johnson sit at opposite ends, staring at one another in malevolence. Female pain is avoided and instead the film observes interior turmoil and bodily transience. Scenes in the mirror room where characters see themselves fully for the first time, or one key character literally pulling their chest open to expose their insides, are obvious symbolism that is actually quite welcome in such a glacially paced film.

Swinton delivers a bout of transformative performances that must be a nod to Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). Without spoiling too much, one appearance even has her staggering out of the wheelchair “mein Mother Susperium! I can walk!”. I see Swinton in a Guadagnino movie as a stand-in for the director – perhaps due to her presenter role in his debut The Protagonists (1999). Her roles as the stern dance instructor is full Swinton, with a subtle arc that really hits at the film’s climax. But it’s her heavily made up role as octogenarian German man Dr. Jozef Klemperer that deserves plaudits. It’s through his story that Suspiria really covers its key theme of generational trauma, as his softening coincides with his reckoning. It’s a shame that the promotional trail has reduced this performance to Andy-Kaufman-esque hoaxes, because taken on its own merits Swinton is doing her best work in years.

Johnson wins the screen by doing little outside of the extraordinary physical dance moments – like her mother there is a sensuality that she is confident to let sit. Then Jessica Harper from the original shows up in a small but vital role. Her face, older, but warmly recognisable, is the perfect meta-moment for a scene about the clash of the past and present. Guadagnino frequently uses this doubling of text and meta-text, like subverting the creative effects of the original for an infrequent pulse of CGI blood. It operates as a distancing effect. There’s enough going on that even if half of the film doesn’t work for you, there are half a dozen more elements that do pay off. Guadagnino doesn’t just eschew the original, he seems disinterested in the entire supernatural element of the film. Suspiria is really about all the other stuff, and when the witches get out of its way, it works like gangbusters.

Suspiria premieres at the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st. It then shows at trhe Cambridge Film Festival, between October 25th and November 1st. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, November 16th.

Call it by another name!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s rare for cinema to come quite so close to perfection as Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017).

The Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay earlier this month was well deserved, and the legions of devotees on Twitter to be expected. That Instagram account where lead actors Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer are superimposed over Monet canvases captures the essence of the picture perfectly (pictured above and below), in a bizarre way.

Much like a snatched afternoon trip to the Musée de l’Orangerie, with its impressive exhibition of Monet’s waterlilies spanning the entire length and breadth of the walls, Call Me By Your Name feels like a fleeting glance into something much bigger than oneself. A snapshot of a world more delicate, more fragile, than our own. A world where you’re welcome to come and look, but unfortunately where you can’t stay. The museum is closing, and the reel has run out of film.

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If you are gay, you’ll suffer

It’s is also unique in the way it depicts gay romance, being that it is one of the only noteworthy works I can recall which does not eventually circle around into some sort of unbearable misery. The traditional queer breakdown scene is absent, as is the tearful coming out, the familial rejection, the violent assault, the tragic untimely death.

The overwhelmingly negative story arcs occupied by gay characters in both mainstream and arthouse media have a funny habit of leaving a bad taste in the mouths of young LGBT people. And I’m not talking about homophobic works, about the queer coding of villains, but the films the community reveres and holds up as our own.

Brokeback Mountain’s (Ang Lee, 2005) Jack Twist is murdered by a gang of passing homophobes. Sook-hee and Hideko’s relationship The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) verges on abusive, founded on a veritable mountain of lies and deceit. The eponymous Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015; pictured below) loses custody of her daughter. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) is a lifelong chronicle of one man’s struggle to come to terms with his identity. The message starts to become clear. You’ll suffer, if you’re queer.

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A rosy existence

While Call Me By Your Name may not neatly tie a bow around Elio and Oscar’s relationship with all the fairy tale charm of a romantic comedy, at no point does their homosexuality cause them undue heartache or suffering.

Neither feels ashamed of their attraction to the other. Their family and friends are accepting of the relationship. There isn’t even any ill will from Elio’s ex-girlfriend Marzia, who gets a rather raw deal from the entire situation. No one is left beaten to a pulp on the pavement. Chalamet’s tearful Visions of Gideon closeup does not play out underneath the yellow light of a hospital ward, as his lover wheezes out his final breath. Elio and Oscar may not ride off into the sunset together, but the extenuating circumstances which tear them apart are not founded in prejudice or violence.

This is what made the film radical. Call Me By Your Name demonstrated that queer love could exist on screen, not to be some parable of noble suffering, but to simply play out for its own sake.

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So, what’s next?

Director Luca Guadagnino told USA Today on the Oscars red carpet that a sequel was in the early stages of production, loosely based around the epilogue of André Aciman’s original novel. He plans to set it five years on – the original film is set in 1983 – and deal directly with the AIDS crisis.

This is where the proverbial fly begins to make its way into the ointment.

I preface what I’m about to say with the following: queer narratives where characters suffer as a result of their queerness remain deeply relevant, and will do as long as the community continues to face undue discrimination and misery. This particularly applies to stories concerning the AIDS crisis. Furthermore, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Elio and Oliver get an easier ride than other queer characters because they’re two affluent white men, which is worth keeping in the back of the mind when discussing LGBT sorrow in film in this context.

Gay narratives can hardly be expected to exist in an a political vacuum, at least not quite at this stage in history. But to create a sequel to Call Me By Your Name which leaves the rose-tinted world it presently depicts, to hit it with a cold harsh dose of reality, dilutes what was ultimately innovative about it. It’s like spray painting a vital political statement over Monet’s water lilies. There’s a time and a place, and for once it’s not here.

Only having access to queer cinema pockmarked by pain is devastating for children growing up gay, as they come to believe this is all their life can ever be. Subliminally, they are told they carry within them a defect, and someone somewhere will always be conspiring to punish them for it.

I’m sure Guadagnino would create a work of abject beauty for this proposed sequel, if his filmography thus far is anything to go on. I’m sure I’d enjoy it, too. But if this is the direction he plans to take, then I fear it may dilute what made it the original work beautiful. By all means, make a film about the Aids crisis – cast Chalamet and Hammer all over again, for what it’s worth. But make them different characters, make it a different world. Let us keep our happy gays. We have so very few.

We need positive queer narratives. We need stories where boys can fall in love with boys and girls can fall in love with girls without fear that some outside force will make them hurt for it. We need bike rides through the Italian countryside, we need impromptu dances parties set to the Psychedelic Furs, we need that whole saga with the peach. We need friends and families who accept us as we are, we need beauty and art and life, and we need to know that if it all falls through it’s not because we were queer and that meant we weren’t allowed to be happy in the first place.

We need Call Me By Your Name. Unadulterated, and as it is.

Call me by Your Name

Posted on by mjbstaging

Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, 2016) has just twisted Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971) and he has the right to do so. Times have changed. A queer movie can be treated as a universal love story. Call Me by Your Name was praised by public and the critics at 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

In the summer of 1983 in northern Italy, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a 17-year-old boy, is about to receive a guest in his aristocratic house. He is lending his bed to Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American scholar who has some work to do with Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor specialising in Greco-Roman culture. Elio and Oliver will share the same toilet as well as a desire for each other.

Just like in Visconti’s masterpiece, the story begins when a foreigner comes to the Italian territory. In Call me By Your Name, though, it is the young guy who invests in the more mature gay professor. Elio is a talented musician who hasn’t been yet tortured by fame and perfection – as Dirk Bogart, a music composer, has in the earlier movie. Elio follows Oliver not throughout the Venetian canals, but in the spiral and labyrinthic building he lives in. Elio is sick: his nose bleeds. Maybe there is death on its way, too.

The image of Venus, the goddess of love, is present in both films. In Visconti’s film, the young and androgynous teenager Tadzio, is portrayed as a statue in the sunset by the sea; in Guadagnino’s feature the statue of Venus emerges from the deep waters. Another Venus appears on the slides Oliver is analysing for an academic paper.

The Venus stands not just for love, but for beauty and lust. Elio’s hormones are at their peak. When he cannot have Oliver, he goes for his girlfriend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Love and lust are the motivations for our main characters. They both forget about their Apollonian personalities as a musician and a scholar and instead reveal their Dionysian persona. The outcome is a stunningly sensual relationship.

Guadagnino’s films have often been criticised in his country. Sometimes critics say they are not Italian enough, for Guadagnino has often worked with English-speaking actors. His first film (The Protagonists, 1999) had Tilda Swinton as the lead. Some believe that he portrays Italians in a sterotypical way, which is gesticulating a lot and quarrelling for trivial reasons. Here Guadagnino presents an atypical patriarch, which embraces the homosexuality of a son.

Call Me by Your Name brought to Sundance a delicate and emotional story, to an audience used to search lovers on dating sites. This is when this piece was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 27th.

Call Me by Your Name is in our top 10 dirtiest movies of 2017 – click here for more information.