It had already happened with Luca, the 2021 Pixar Animated Film of the Year, that AO Scott for the New York Times best and most punctually titled his own review – at the time “Calamari by Your Name” to underline the similarity that many she had been arguing between the cartoon and Call me by your name by Luca Guadagnino, of which Pixar seemed to have tacitly reproduced the Genoese version with some sea monsters. It is certainly coincidental but still amusing that Scott’s new and perfect Calembour title still centers on the Italian director whose last film he reviewed (again with Timothée Chalamet), Bones and All, which hit theaters on November 23. “You Eat What You Are”, parodying the name of the series We Are Who We Are directed by Guadagnino in 2019 and of which the new film was highly acclaimed at the last Venice Film Festival, where it won the Lion d’Argento for the Directing resumes the lines and transfers the classic coming-of-age themes at the heart of the series into a body horror context. “You Eat What You Are” because we are not only what we are, but above all what we eat and vice versa, synthesis of the entire plot of Bones and All whose protagonists are two cannibal teenagers in love who travel in search of a space that can only be theirs.
Adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 novel of the same name, as with any educational television or film product – except in this case the main character seeks to find an emotionally and ethically viable way of dealing with cannibalism – the story’s outlines are linear and subtly simple. In fact, we know the life of Maren (Canadian actress, born 1994, Taylor Russell, full-time star, breathes life into her), mid-80s, just eighteen, intellectually curious and misunderstood, abandoned by her non-cannibal father after a row of accidents that left him unable to control her hunger (which first appeared when she was eating with her babysitter when she was two months old), who travels from Virginia to Minnesota in search of her mother with one left by her parents Videotape discovered the same nature. Along the way he meets other men of his kind, good, not so good, frightening ones, until the most important turning point, the arrival of Lee-Chalamet, who by now is adept at playing the vulnerable disadvantaged, accidentally found in a convenience store and with whom he I begin an intense, albeit short, love story. And despite all that, despite the blood, intestines and other internal organs whose transcription only causes a certain mixing of bodily fluids, what remains after watching Bones and All is not its scariest or Cronenbergian side, but the idea of having the lives of two ailing boys spied on, looking for nothing but a world they understood.
Taylor Russell in a scene from the film
Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
Like Raw, the story of an aspiring veterinarian and first feature film by Palme d’Or winner for Titane Julia Ducournau, or We Are What We Are, a 2013 film directed by Jim Mickle about two very young cannibal sisters who wish and fighting for a normal life, and again with the latest Hatching, a Finnish horror story featured and appreciated in Sundance about a gymnast whose mother cannot love (Fresh was also released in 2022, in which cannibalism with the phenomenon associated with love (dating and actually fitting to the subject the movie sucks too), the body horror genre has a deep, almost atavistic and already deepened connection of cinema to adolescence and the coming of adulthood, as a form viewed in disgust at the monstrosity we have clung to, yet “justified”.
So the story of Maren and Lee, a sentimental experience, became a road movie in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde and especially the Badlands. You travel across the country hoping that the sadness and inconsistency that has afflicted you from one point will not find you. That they don’t follow you like a faithful mist from one coast to another, always following you hoping that they are more connected to your roots and that you can therefore move away, changing direction, accumulating distances and a new one You create life for yourself as Lee and Maren. Maybe fall in love, buy a house, a new bed, enroll in a class. Fill your days with distractions. And instead, as Guadagnino suggests, who is sometimes annoying, sometimes sensual, vulgar, campy or cloying, and in Bones and All it is touchingly delicate and very precise (thanks in part to the melancholic photography of Arseni Khachaturan) that marks our transition from innocence Accompanied to Maturity It’s a time to lose everything and feel the pinch and prepare to live the rest of our lives with the band-aid.
According to an article published in The Atlantic, based on a body of research conducted over the past few years, from 2015 we would witness a change, although we believe that opposites may attract each other better than those who already corresponded of course due to difficult times that we are having and going through, to indeed choose partners who are more and more like us, who understand us as it happened when we were younger, to cover each other’s wounds and burdens of things to share. Aware that even love for like will not be enough, as demonstrated by Maren, with whom Russell received the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for his interpretation of a story composed of many different things and from which multiple meanings emerge – not least the appropriate one Vision to which society has marginalized teenagers like zombies since the 1980s. A teenage film in the best sense of the word, which combines the horror of growing up with the tenderness and purity of first feelings, but above all, just like love, it literally devours you.