Innocence and corruption combine in a unique love story.
Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is a horror-love story between two teenagers, Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) who are confused about their identities. They have that sulky quiet of internet introverts hiding ungovernable wishes — in this case, a congenital, compulsive need to eat human flesh, which is the film’s subliminal political metaphor.
It starts in 1986, the political past established by TV and radio news clips, specifically U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani’s discussing the suicide of politician Donald Manes. According to New York Magazine journalist Mark Jacobson, it was “easily the most Grand Guignol of recent New York City corruption scandals.” That gothic political mystery haunts the cross-country road trip of Guadagnino’s star-crossed innocents — similar to the way in which characters are obsessed by obscure political scandals in Italian political thrillers such as The Tenth Victim and Illustrious Corpses.
Maren’s and Lee’s Gen X naïveté prefigures today’s Gen Z, and Guadagnino captures the millennium’s social mood. Horror is not my go-to genre (I found Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake gruesome), but I’m impressed by his intuition that modern girl-and-boy sexual conflicts express contemporary spiritual crisis. (That’s what Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms attempted; film-savvy Guadagnino also evokes David Bowie’s vampire film The Hunger and the ’50s melodrama All the Fine Young Cannibals.)
Positive reviews for Bones and All were predictably jaded, focusing on shock, the graphic depiction of Maren’s and Lee’s cannibalistic drive. Cynical reviewers missed how the youths’ ravaging instinct derived from an enigmatic inheritance, the power-mad vengeance induced by the current, destructive political regime — specifically their parents’ moral neglect. Maren and Lee could be stand-in Antifa warriors (the shadow army that Biden and the mainstream media ignore). They’re second-generation lost romantics, ruined liberals. Guadagnino’s allegory details the self-destruction at the heart of teens’ untutored idealism.
Set, mythically, across America’s Midwest, like Terrence Malick’s serial-killer road movie Badlands, Bones and All poeticizes spiritual corrosion (the next step of what Jacobson pinpointed as “just one more footnote in the vast saga of . . . public corruption”). Maren and Lee look uncannily like those clueless George Floyd/BLM student protesters who marched in the streets, chanting, “This is what diversity looks like!”
Russell’s biracial Maren and Chalamet’s bisexual Lee desire the “chaste rapture” that music critic Jim Miller found in the classic pop song “Be My Baby.” That’s Guadagnino’s approach to these emotional cripples longing for acceptance. Their misdeeds come bloodily close to those of Antifa monsters and are exploited by a creepy adult who shares their diabolical bent: Mark Rylance’s Sully, a nasty version of his usual Spielberg gnome, stalks Maren and shadows the lovers’ uncontrollable erotic impulses, as when Lee seduces a carnival barker (Jake Horowitz), preying on social norms, revealing homosexual panic and regret.
Just when Bones and All gets gross, Russell’s and Chalamet’s misguided romance becomes captivating, reminding me of a moment in Guadagnino’s fascinating 2013 documentary Bertolucci on Bertolucci, about the maestro of terrified-youth films The Grim Reaper, Before the Revolution, Last Tango in Paris, The Dreamers, Stealing Beauty, and You and Me. Discussing the May 1968 rebellion, Bertolucci explained: “Youth live only in the present and possibly the future. There is no worship of the past. All students are middle-class. They’re in the struggle of the son against the father.”
That summarizes the lesson of Bones and All. Bertolucci also admiringly quoted Jean Cocteau’s profound maxim “Cinema is death at work,” which is consistent with this film’s political metaphor. Mainstream media ignore Antifa’s savagery, but Guadagnino’s Grand Guignol romance is intimate social observation.
