"The world of love had no place for monsters in it."
Bones & All review
This is the second Luca Guadagnino movie I have seen and I watched it right after Challengers. I enjoyed Bones & All more.
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Probably because the director manages to create this post-apocalyptic feeling based around the fact that these cannibals just avoid people as much as they can, their time is spent isolated, most of that isolation is spent in running away from connection, from society and Luca Guadaningo builds the movie's theme around this loneliness. He creates beauty among the empty abandoned houses that eaters use, he creates style in them by clothing them with vibrant or more grounded colors, he makes us listen to them by giving them specific musical connections. Maren the main protagonist has this single guitar string that plays really loud in the silence whenever she gets closer to where she's going. spoiler
It feels romantic to me because it also captures the scenic rurality of America so well. There are a lot of shots of just the skies as the two main characters drive across states, from Ohio to Kentucky to Missouri and Minnesota. The beautiful green fields, the forests, a small town here and there, s carnival it's all there. I have never seen a more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing America as it is.
Bones & All is a moving coming-of-age tale about the innocence of age and shows the struggle with accepting who we are when nobody else does. Everything looks like a memory of an innocent age, in a contrast to "Challengers", Bones & All has a softer aesthetic to it. There are no lavishly executed shots of one character in the frame to make them look like super models as in "Challengers", everything just feels more natural.
The thesis of this movie as I see it is, do you deserve love and other good things even if you are so unwanted by society?
7/10