YOU EAT WHAT YOU ARE
Anyone who travels the roads of America must sooner or later confront the question of what to eat. Do you prefer the convenience of interstate fast food or the authenticity of a local greasy spoon? For the footloose young lovers in Bones And All, Luca Guadagnino’s gory, ridiculous and curiously touching new film, the decision is more a matter of “who” than “what”. Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) are foodies gripped by a specific and exotic appetite. They will order pancakes in a pinch, but what they really crave is human flesh.
These fine young cannibals — they prefer the term “eaters” — are part of a subculture that haunts the margins of mid-80s Middle America, recognising one another by smell and subtle behavioural cues. Maren has grown up under the protection of her non-eater father (André Holland), who takes off when she is 18, leaving behind an audiocassette that helps her and the audience understand her condition, which first emerged when, as a toddler, she snacked on a babysitter.
Maren learns that her mother was also an eater and sets out to find her. The journey winds from Virginia to Minnesota and beyond, by way of picturesque spots in Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky and other states. (The cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan, favours a moody autumnal palette.) Along the way, Maren meets a few others of her kind and learns something about their ways. A middle-aged drifter named Sully (a sad and spooky Mark Rylance) teaches her how to sniff out other eaters and shows her the rope he has braided from the hair of his prey. Later, she meets Lee at a convenience store, looking on as he deals with and ingests an obnoxious customer.
Grisly as it is, Bones And All is less a horror movie than an outlaw romance in the tradition of Bonnie And Clyde and Badlands. You’re more afraid of what might happen to Maren and Lee than of what they might do to anyone else. There is a sweetness to Chalamet and Russell that makes it hard to see them as monsters, and Guadagnino takes an empathetic, if not altogether approving, view of their tastes.
What does it mean to be an eater? The movie teases various analogies, some more palatable than others. What defines Maren, Lee, Sully and a few others (notably a gleeful predator played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is an affliction, a lifestyle and an identity. It’s something they’re born with, and something the squares (or should I say the meals) can never really understand.
Maren, openhearted and intellectually curious, wants to find an emotionally and ethically sustainable approach to cannibalism. If the compulsion to eat other people can’t be suppressed, could it somehow be managed? Individual eaters seem to make their own rules. Sully tries to seek out victims who are on the verge of death, while Lee persuades himself that his prey somehow had it coming. Maren, seeing how damaged Lee and Sully are (and uncovering the horror of her mother’s fate), dares to imagine something like happiness. Her belief in her own goodness is disarming, and Russell’s performance is fresh and unaffected. She plays Maren as the heroine of a young-adult novel.
Which she is. Guadagnino adapted Bones And All from Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 book of the same name, aimed at teenage readers. The movie, bloody enough for an R rating, isn’t exactly a cannibal Twilight, but its romanticism — its passionate commitment to its vulnerable, misunderstood misfits — is defiantly and uncondescendingly adolescent.
Guadagnino is an elusive, sometimes beguiling (and sometimes exasperating) filmmaker, by turns vulgar, philosophical and sensual. His own tastes range from vintage trash to deep-dish aestheticism, and at his best — in A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name and the HBO series We Are Who We Are — he can combine melodramatic pop extravagance with art-house refinement.
Bones And All is a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods — anxious, horny, dreamy, sad — in search of a metaphor. Or maybe the metaphor is obvious. Neither raw nor fully cooked, it might make you lose your appetite, but it’s more likely that you’ll still be hungry when it’s over.