Guadagnino doesn’t lie — not now, at the height of his international fame, and not before, as an aspiring filmmaker born to an Italian father and Algerian mother in Palermo, Sicily. And the director’s muse, Tilda Swinton, the figure that has accompanied the entire trajectory of his career, can testify. In 1994, Swinton was visiting Rome for a showing of Derek Jarman’s work in Palazzo delle Esposizioni — a grandiose, off-white colored gallery at the top of a wide staircase leading into the trafficked Via Nazionale. Guadagnino had previously tried to reach Swinton and offer her a role in a short film he had written. Through the crowd of the exhibition, Guadagnino, who lived in Rome at the time, walked up to the Hollywood star to ask her why she hadn’t responded. Guadagnino knew what he wanted. Looking back, Swinton tells The New Yorker that she was “massively and instantly caught in the genius of his guilt trip.” From that moment, the two clicked and Swinton has described their relationship — the British actress has starred in four of Guadagnino’s pictures, from The Protagonists in 1999 to Suspiria in 2018 — as one between “a pair of six-year-olds in a sandbox,” according to The Guardian. As six-year-olds do, Guadagnino plays, destroys to build again, invents — “e’ un gioco,” says Guadagnino in the same interview with Alò, describing his new film. It’s a game.

Guadagnino’s Bones And All, starring emergent Taylor Russell and Hollywood veteran Timothée Chalamet is currently in theaters. Based on Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 novel of the same name, Bones And All is Guadagnino’s first film shot entirely in the United States and revolves around two cannibals — a metaphor for two tormented, isolated souls — who fall in love as they find solace in protecting, or merely accompanying, one another’s cursed solitude. Guadagnino’s camera appears to frame and elevate the decadence of the Americana — an abandoned warehouse here, a gas station there, a convenience store in a town forgotten by God — with the same grace as a mind-altering, gourmet prawn dish in I Am Love (2009), a swimming pool during Pantelleria’s scirocco season in A Bigger Splash (2015), and an orchard in the Northern Italian countryside of Call Me By Your Name (2017). As described by Swinton herself, Guadagnino builds a “sense-ationalist” cinema, finding its force in the senses it exudes and, in turn, provokes.

Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, to me, exemplifies his style. His remake of Jacques Deray’s 1969 La Piscine holds all the things that fascinate the director — deceit, art, the past encroaching on the present, music, betrayal, and, of course, Italy. 

In David Hockney’s 1967 painting that inspired the title, and maybe even the essence, of the film, a splash erupts from a pool in front of a house in the desert. The water surrounding the splash, however, remains in an unnatural, immoble equilibrium — an effect without a known cause. The house’s sliding doors reflect objects above the pool that we, as viewers, can’t see and, in turn, can’t trust to really be there. 

Guadagnino follows suit. In A Bigger Splash, the main characters — a cast adorning the names of Tilda Swinton, the protagonist, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ralph Fiennes and Dakota Johnson — are the reflections in Hockney’s painting. They’re there, but not really; they’re there, but not for the reasons they say are; they’re there, but they’re not who they proclaim to be. While some more than others, they’re all rotten. They move through the dry, asphyxiating winds that ruffle the Sicilian island of Pantelleria and, blown by a sudden gust, fall into a game of brinkmanship, infidelity and violence. As the film begins to reveal a nation’s skeletons in its closet — from Italy’s racism, the xenophobia studded in its colloquial, day-to-day routine, to an almost prophetic corruption in favor of the élite —, those of its characters begin to unveil in conjunction. As mentioned before, Guadagnino knows Italy — if Call Me By Your Name made everybody want to buy a one-way ticket to Italy, A Bigger Splash makes you book the return. 

The “horrific,” then, and its various manifestations, seems to have inhabited all of Guadagnino’s films long before the arrival of Bones And All. And, perhaps, Guadagnino’s versatility of genre resides in this — in the fact that the “horrific” can appropriately reside in all places, from the emergence of a sculpture of Venus in Lake Garda to two lovers escaping a shared curse across a rural, barren American countryside. 

If you’re not faint of heart, I’ll see you at the movies.

What were you doing? 

What were you hearing? 

Do you remember?

In Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 “Wild Strawberries,” Isak Borg — the protagonist — remembers. For that matter, his remembrance constitutes the very matrix of the film: As Isak drives to reach Lund University for the ceremony that will pronounce him Doctor Jubilaris after 50 years of medical practice, he encounters a series of detours, bumps and obstacles that will throw him into a spiral of cognitive foraging through his past. 

Isak is initially introduced as a cantankerous, 78 year old widow with a crippling fear of death — a fear that permeates his consciousness and invades his recurrent nightmares. In fact, Bergman often chooses to depict him accordingly smoking a cigar in a figurative representation of his mortality, foreshadowing the imminent degradation of his body through the slow burn of cigar paper. 

The film unfolds entirely on June 1 — a date that symbolises the renewal of a new month, of almost a new season and, as will be Isak’s case, of a newfound perception of life. As Isak sets off on the road, he stumbles upon the summer home of his adolescence and young adulthood — “the place where wild strawberries go.” It is here, in the nexus that holds all of Isak’s past, that Bergman accordingly begins to reconstruct scenes — whether real or imagined — from the protagonist’s memory. In the reconstructions, Bergman maintains Isak’s actual form as the irascible, rigid doctor we have come to know and never shows the protagonist as his younger self. The spectator is thereby presented with a dissonance, albeit a telling one: To convey the unrelenting, constant ardour of Isak’s remembrance, it is his current self who spies on his once beloved cousin Sara, who eavesdrops past family lunches in the summer, who relives the moment in which he caught his wife cheating and who re-undergoes university examinations under an imagined Freudian, intrusive presence of his relatives. 

Isak’s past comes to co-exist alongside his present, or, perhaps, it always has: Isak has never let it go, not the heartbreak of Sara’s betrayal nor the oppressive imposter syndrome he has carried throughout all of his life. No, because right on the day of his utmost professional realisation, Isak chooses to press on the poignant, sore bruises of his past. As Isak drives, the upheld margins that apparently delineate his existence – once as clear as those cut by the razor of a surgical blade – lose their precision. The cigar paper keeps burning. Isak, “the world’s best doctor,” begins to see himself. His real self, beyond the surface-level definitions stamped upon him. In a crucial scene of the film, Sara holds a mirror towards Isak to — ironically — reveal himself to his own self. “You know so much, yet you know nothing,” she says, encapsulating both the film and Isak’s existential dilemma: Did I know, live or do enough? Can any of us say we have?

Isak, however, doesn’t travel alone. Alongside him is his daughter-in-law Marianne, a disarmingly radiant yet tormented young woman who is at once his complement and his antagonist. If he is allowed to smoke the cigar, she is not permitted to do so; if she is hysterical, he is the image of rationality; and, most importantly, if he embodies the decay of a lineage as the only living son, she is the sole hope of its reinvigoration. In fact, just moments before reaching Lund University, Marianne reveals her unexpected pregnancy to Isak to define the film’s point of inflection. Against her beauty, from which new life is about to rise, Isak moves closer to dissipation with each passing moment — the natural process of ‘the old making way for the new,’ one would say. After Marianne’s revelation, Bergman’s reconstructions cease. Isak returns to the present — and only the present — to accept his inexorable role in such a process with a newfound tranquillity. 

Why, though? What reassures him to do so? Well, one thing’s for sure: Marianne and Isak come to be the two faces of the same coin. Regardless of their apparent incongruences, they share the same fundamental, existential discomfort of taking up space — and thereby existence — in the world. As Marianne describes her urge to live and give life despite her mental suffering, Isak realises that he’s not alone. And, perhaps, there is still some of that urge — an urge that one could call hope — left for him too. 

Isak starts to live in a world without fields of “wild strawberries” to guide him. And, as he serenely falls asleep after having attended the anticipated ceremony, we could say that he’s done all that he could. And that, maybe, he’s done well.

— Day for Night (1973), François Truffaut 

What if a film director wants  a scene to be filmed at night, but circumstances can’t allow it? In our current age, characterized by the most advanced VFX to have ever existed in cinematic history, the demand doesn’t pose an issue at all. And yet, what if that question had been asked in, say, the ’70s? In that case, you’d most likely use the “day for night” technique, placing a filter on the camera’s lens or using an underexposed film stock. At least, that’s what one of the  — if not the — most acclaimed directors of the French Nouvelle Vague movement François Truffaut does in his 1973 ode to cinema, Day for Night. 

Day for Night makes use of the cinematic equivalent of the literary “framed narrative.” In the outer narrative, it’s summer on the Côte d’Azur as an international co-production is shooting the fictional Je vous présente Pamela, or, as commonly referred to, as just Pamela. As the “film within a film,” Pamela recounts the internal narrative of a newly-wed bride leaving her husband to elope with her father-in-law. Truffaut, in turn, becomes a “director within a director” and leaves the viewfinder to stand in front of the camera and play Ferrand — the exhausted, yet strikingly patient, director of Pamela. 

In the opening scene of Day for Night, a film set of a Parisian plaza — built within the rustic countryside of Nice — stands still. Alongside the low sounds of a crane or a dolly, a sense of calm pervades the scene. And then, the magic word: action! Alphonse — the betrayed husband played by Truffaut’s career-long companion Jean-Pierre Léaud — starts walking across the plaza until he finds his father, Alexandre, standing in front of him. The two look at each other. After three seconds of silence, an enraged Alphonse slaps Alexandre in the face. Then, another word: cut! With the same force in Alphonse’s slap, the frame cuts to Ferrand sitting by the camera and yelling directions through a megaphone. Alphonse’s slap, then, isn’t solely a reflection of a son’s anger towards his father. Rather, the gesture is a tool to immediately slap the audience itself. Within the first five minutes, Truffaut urges us to wake up, to resume our disbeliefs, and to pay attention to the chaotic, imprecise, struggle-ridden, yet nonetheless disarmingly beautiful, craft of cinema. 

When you watch Day for Night, you won’t be able to help but feel as though Truffaut himself was tugging at your sleeve, asking you to get closer, to see beyond the researched, acted and written two-dimensional product that will one day reach the screen of a theater.

He urges us to dwell in it, feel it, feel it all. Feel the disappointment of a malfunctioning prop, the pain of an actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the joy of dedicating one’s life to cinema, the frustration of an actor forgetting her lines over and over and over again or the shock of a cast member’s unexpected death. 

Feel it as if you were a part of it and take it with you when you leave the movie theater because, even when the lights turn back on, the spell won’t end as it usually does. No, not this time. This time, the spell is life itself.

It’s 1984. Two brothers — Fabietto and Marchino — are wandering, almost aimlessly, through Naples’ serpentine roads. In just moments, Marchino will pronounce a sentence that, while initially  incomprehensible to young Fabietto, will return to him years later with a newfound force, a force that carries the taste of trauma, of loss and, at the same time, of epiphany: “cinema is useless, but it can distract you from reality… reality is lousy.”  

When I heard those precise words from the theater’s audio system, I was watching the 8:30 a.m.  screening of Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God” at the Venice Film Festival — in and of itself a dream that had, due to a series of yet unexplainable coincidences, somehow materialized — and I felt as though I had been stripped naked. Marchino was talking to Fabietto, of course, but he was also talking to me. And, most likely, to everyone else in the theater. Marchino was exposing me. Marchino was exposing the sense of perpetual disorientation that has accompanied me for as long as I can remember; the desire to seek order and meaning and definition to the unclean margins of life, and, for many of us, the source of our soothing from, as Sorrentino himself would say, “the unease of existing in the world” — that is, cinema. 

Which brings me here. I’m Alice. Almost nine years ago, I moved to Boston from my native Rome.  I’ve lived between the two cities ever since (if we choose to ignore the two years my family and I  spent in Las Vegas … but that’s a whole other story) with all the psychological effects and identity  

crises that an adolescence divided into two (or three) could bring and that, surely, almost all  Wellesley students feel or have come to feel themselves. I guess you could call this a film column,  a column about film, a column about international film or a column written by a confused  Biochemistry major and English minor that is currently studying abroad in England with a career deviating obsession with film, or, ultimately, anything you’d like. Whatever you may choose, you’ll  find it in every edition of The Wellesley News and it’ll cover all ages of international cinema, from  classics to the very latest projects. 

For now, I thought I’d call the column “Lousy Realities,” a title which, I believe, requires no further  explanation. To return to Sorrentino, non vi disunite. “Don’t come undone.”