It’s Bones and All day here at the Venice Film Festival, where the Timothée Chalamet-Taylor Russell starrer from Luca Guadagnino received a 10-minute standing ovation after its world premiere screening this evening.
The audience cheered with shouts of “Luca! Luca! Luca!” — a reaction that delayed the beginning of the evening’s next competition film.
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Based on the book by Camille DeAngelis and adapted by David Kajganich, the film tells the story of Maren (Russell) and Lee (Chalamet), two unlikely companions who unite in America’s Midwest in the 1980s after Maren is abandoned by her father. As they make their way across the country, their shared compulsion to feast on human flesh and their struggle to reconcile the immorality of their desire forces them into society’s margins, destined to deal with the consequences of their true selves for the rest of their lives.
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In his review, Deadline’s Damon Wise called the film “an almost anthropological study of outsiderdom, using the false dawn of the American 1980s as a sort of petri dish for a new kind of conformity that has led us where we are today.”
The Chalamet faithful started packing the area outside the Sala Grande from early this morning, hoping to catch a glimpse of the actor — who graciously stopped to chat and sign autographs before this afternoon’s press conference.
During that sit-down, which also included co-stars Mark Rylance and Chloë Sevigny, Chalamet waxed on the challenges facing today’s kids.
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“To be young now is to be intensely judged,” he said. In Bones And All, “it was a relief to play characters who are wrestling with an internal dilemma absent the ability to go on Reddit or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in. Without casting judgment on that, because if you can find your tribe there, then all the power. But I think it’s tough to be alive now. I think societal collapse is in the air, it smells like it, and without being pretentious, I hope that’s why these movies matter because that’s the role of the artist is to shine a light on what’s going on.”
MGM has domestic and international distribution rights to Bones And All while Vision Distribution will distribute the film in Italy.