MONTERREY, NL (apro).– Despite its extreme and bloody nature, “Hasta los huesos” (“Bones and all”, 2022) is a love story.
On the fringes of society, during the eighties, two pre-adult teenagers embark on a tour of the United States with different purposes. Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Thimotée Chalamet) are misfits with no place in a world that rejects them. They have recently met and realize how lucky they are to have each other, as the scared society is not ready to accept their true nature.
Like outcasts, dispossessed and without malice, equipped only with a pickup truck and a few dollars, they wander here and there, crouching through the days, not knowing what tomorrow holds.
The director Luca Guadagnino, who had already extracted the best of Chalamet in “Call me by your name” (“Call me by your name”, 2017) returns to make another great romantic story, but this one with a component of horror and viscera. This young couple was born with a unique condition: they are cannibals. They do not eat human flesh by choice, but by nature. As if they were a brotherhood of vampires that hide to avoid notoriety, cannibals identify themselves by smell and are recognized as dangerous beings. They can go unnoticed, if they wish, but deep down, they maintain the compulsion for insane appetite.
These boys are cute, good people and they love each other transparently, but they fight against their instincts and the consequences of their actions, because they know that theirs is outside the law. It is not pleasant, you know, to taste the blood and leave the victims, but they overcome each time to understand that they cannot avoid their particular deviation.
Guadagnino is compassionate towards misfits. Hanging around in a bubble, the couple wander aimlessly, as if shuffling through the streets of a post-apocalyptic world. However, they come to understand the cues to their behavior and feel a bit of stability.
They live in deep and terrible contrasts. Their affective relationship is candid. Two beautiful and free boys, without any paternal restrictions, enjoy the glory of their first love, and between kisses, they must take time to satisfy their instincts. It is then that, when activated, they enter a bloodbath that, despite everything, does not make them feel unworthy. In their creepy lifestyle, all they have to do is move on, without condemnation. They barely feel that they are going through a cursed destiny, but with a resignation similar to indifference, despite her concerns.
In this interpretation of Camille DeAngelis’s novel, there is an interesting anthropological approach in the portrait of this couple, which shows the other side of the relegation. As the center of an unusual and repulsive relationship, willing, willingly, to renounce coexistence in society, they testify to the difficulties they face to live in a strange environment in which they will never be accepted, if they decide to come out of their closet. fear in which they live.
Russell, as a variation of Zendaya, is terrific as the girl who seems to be running from herself, trying to find answers to the childhood abandonment she’s suffered and the suffering caused by the irrepressible compulsion to condition her for everything. She is the perfect match for the always solvent Chalamet, with his boyish appearance who, in this story, finally finds peace with the girl who understands everything perfectly.
“Hasta los huesos” is a tape that is terrifying and extremely bloody at times, but always with a look of tenderness towards the cannibals who will always live, far from others.