Luca Guadagnino

Challengers: Thirst Serve

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor in Challengers

One of the first times we see Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) in Challengers, she’s clad only in black lingerie, the camera observing her backside in a manner somewhere between appreciative and exploitative. Empirically, it’s the most skin we see in the movie, yet from the characters’ point of view, it doesn’t represent Tashi at her most alluring. That comes later (really earlier, in the film’s chronology), when two admirers are watching her play tennis at the junior U.S. Open. As she trades ground strokes with an overmatched opponent, they gawk at her combination of power and grace. “Look at that fucking backhand,” one of them whispers, in an awed tone that suggests a repressed teenager who just caught a glimpse of Pamela Anderson in Playboy.

It seems diminishing to characterize Challengers, the riveting and ravishing new picture from Luca Guadagnino, as a sports movie. Sure, it follows the entwined lives of three gifted tennis players, but it’s more about their emotional cravings than their physical exploits. Yet it doesn’t treat tennis as mere window dressing. Instead, it captures the ineffable appeal of sports—the cathartic thrill of competition, the rigor of perfecting one’s craft, the blurry line between passion and professionalism—and binds it to the characters’ omnipresent hunger and vulnerability. There are all sorts of games being played here, and some have nothing to do with rackets. Read More

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Suspiria: Witchy Women, Dying and Born Again

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dakota Johnson dances her way into Hell in "Suspiria"

Dance is death in Suspiria, Luca Guadagnino’s insane, exasperating, furiously watchable remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 cult classic. The collision of beauty and brutality on stage is hardly novel; Black Swan gave us a feral portrait of a performer who helplessly sacrificed her body and her sanity in the pursuit of artistic perfection. But Suspiria posits ballet as a more malevolent sort of blood sport, where lithe women twirl and leap and crash, all while sinister forces lurk behind the gleaming mirrors and beneath the polished floorboards, eager to feed on the talents of the young. I’m not speaking metaphorically; this really is a movie about a desiccated matriarch who craves to transplant her soul from her own befouled body into the supple flesh of an unsuspecting protégé. And you thought the battles in the Step Up franchise were intense!

Of course, Suspiria is more (or maybe less) than a gonzo supernatural thriller. “I could explain everything to you; I think that would be wrong, though,” an instructor murmurs to an unnerved pupil. I can’t explain much of anything to you, because this movie defies easy description, even as it eagerly courts post-hoc analysis. Suffice it to say that Suspiria seems to be about many things. Perhaps it’s about the intersection of political activism and grass-roots fanaticism, given that it’s set in Germany 1977 and glancingly depicts (by way of news broadcasts and radio snippets) the death knell of the Baader-Meinhof movement. Maybe it’s about femininity and solidarity, seeing as it traces the relationships—the camaraderie, the rivalries, the jealousy and admiration—of a company of female dancers at an elite academy. Maybe it’s about self-discovery; its main character, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), initially enters the conservatory’s halls with timidity, only to quickly reveal herself as an ambitious and capable dancer with a hunger for stardom. Maybe it’s about the persistence of fascism; how else to explain the extensive subplot about an elderly German man searching for his wife, who’s believed to have vanished decades ago at the Concentration Camps? Or maybe it’s just about a bunch of old women who want to be young again. Read More

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Call Me by Your Name: One Lazy Summer, a Dance of Desire

Jeremy BeckReviews
Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in "Call Me by Your Name"

“So what do you do around here?” Oliver asks Elio early in Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino’s feverish, unusual love story. In response, the 17-year-old ticks off a number of banal activities—he reads, he swims, he parties—but his answer basically amounts to, “Not much.” Over the course of its 132-minute running time, Call Me by Your Name stirs up a broad array of emotions—desire, heartache, anger, elation, grief—but what it perhaps evokes most effectively is that ineffable state of boyhood restlessness, the feeling of being suspended in a cocoon where nothing of consequence ever happens. Elio is something of an intellectual and musical prodigy (“Is there anything you don’t know?” an amused Oliver asks), but as the movie opens, he is nevertheless waiting for his life to begin.

By the time the film ends, he’ll have undergone a transformative experience that will feel largely familiar to enthusiasts of coming-of-age cinema. Yet while Call Me by Your Name travels well-covered narrative terrain, it is not exactly typical. It is, in essence, a strange telling of a normal story. In chronicling the standard tale of a young man discovering himself, Guadagnino has retained the basic elements but altered them, glazing them with a peculiar finish that mixes awkwardness with compassion. To watch the film is to feel by turns frustrated, surprised, confused, and blissful—you know, kind of like falling in love. Read More

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