Love Me And Eat Me
A cannibal romance would be hard to believe in anyone else’s hands, but Luca Guadagnino has always been an expert in all-consuming desire. Resident expert Iana Murray dissects the filmmaker’s love language.
Luca Guadagnino’s films have long been preoccupied with desire. While Bones and All may be more gruesome than the director’s most sensual works, the heart still takes the lead – albeit in a more brutal way.
It’s established from the very beginning, when Maren (Taylor Russell) escapes at night to meet a friend, a trusted confidant in the isolating world of a new school. Hiding under a coffee table, they share Maren opens up about her past before she takes a deep sniff, and devours her friend’s freshly manicured finger. Maren is acting on her cannibalistic appetites, but just as plausible is a deeper romantic curiosity. Have you ever loved someone so much you wanted to swallow them whole?
The body is a neverending canvas for Guadagnino’s internal exploration of desire. It’s potent in his aptly-titled “Desire” trilogy (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name), where physical pleasures are discovered in sweltering Italian summers. In his two ventures into body horror, Bones and All and Suspiria, matters of the flesh have a more grisly edge, but that search for identity still endures for its heroines, Maren and Susie (Dakota Johnson). They entangle themselves within unforgiving landscapes, and emerge anew. Human bodies are mostly consumed in Bones and All, but Maren’s goes through its own transformation. After her first taste of flesh (that she remembers), she rushes home and admires herself in the mirror, bloodied with the evidence drying in the corners of her mouth.
Like the greatest love stories, Bones and All posits that companionship is necessary for survival, especially for its drifters who feel cast aside. In a place as relentless as the open plains of America, the security of another provides the freedom to discover one’s own wants and needs. Venturing out across the United States to find her mother, Maren meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a fellow eater more settled into the rhythms of a nomad. He’s more certain of what they are, but it’s a truth that Maren isn’t so willing to embrace.
Maren’s hesitance towards her own monstrousness starkly differs from Susie, who readily succumbs to the pull of her darkest – and most liberating – desires. Newly recruited in a dance company helmed by a malicious coven, she soon learns she’s the most powerful witch of them all. She feels the strength in her primal, animalistic dances, writhing in pleasure at her disturbing dreams. In one rehearsal, she goes against Madame Blanc’s (Tilda Swinton) instructions, rebutting that she doesn’t want to jump but crawl on the floor. She feels a force pulling her to the earth, or rather, to the depths where her true power lies. She chooses to follow the call.
For Maren, it’s a more circuitous path to acceptance. She denies her hunger, feeling more disgusted with herself the more she gives in to it. After witnessing both potential and real consequences of her condition – in her hospitalised mother and her victim’s family – she attempts to flee. Compared to the sun-kissed Italian landscapes of Guadagnino’s most celebrated films, the expansive American Midwest is less idyllic as a place of self-discovery. In a society that wholly disapproves of Maren’s tabooed existence, she becomes close to assimilating. But in rejecting who she is, she’s resigning herself to a life of terrifying solitude.
Falling in love allowed her to understand this. If Maren once thought that her taste for cannibalism only destroyed lives and tore families apart, she learns through Lee that it can have a purpose: to protect, and to provide. And so Maren stops running. “Let’s be people,” she asks him, as they make a plan to stay wherever their stolen truck gives out. It isn’t until Maren and Lee build a life together that they find true happiness, no matter how ephemeral it may be.
Bones and All positions the act of eating not as something barbaric, but soul-baring. On all fours, tearing flesh from bone, eaters are at their most primal. The film alludes to the deep intimacy shared when they feast together. When Maren reunites with an embittered Sully (Mark Rylance), an elderly cannibal she shunned, he angrily cries: “I dried off next to you. That means something.” In this disparate community, a meal is sacred. There’s also a suggestive ambition in Lee’s moves to honeytrap his prey for Maren. As the pair gnaw on a poor carnival worker who’s fallen victim to their appetites, it’s just as carnal and, dare I say, as erotic as the sex that preceded it.
To eat is to be vulnerable – to give oneself over completely to another person. At its most heartbreaking, the film deploys this in its final scene. Lee offers himself to Maren: “Love me and eat me, bones and all.” Gore is used sparingly throughout the film, but it’s almost completely absent in Lee’s death. Maren’s head obscures Lee’s chest being consumed, as if it’s an intimate act we shouldn’t be privy to – one not too distant from Elio and Oliver’s first night together in Call Me By Your Name, with the camera panning away to the trees outside. If it weren’t for the torrent of blood leaking into the floorboards, it wouldn’t even be obvious that Maren is eating. Lee’s silent screams could be those of pain, or of ecstasy.
The cannibalistic hunger of Bones and All is just another permutation of the yearning and desire that define Luca Guadagnino’s films. Growth and heartbreak are a part of every coming-of-age, but here, the stakes have never been higher. Love is a matter of life and death.
Bones And All is in cinemas now.