Chalamet: ‘It’s tough to be alive’ with social media ‘onslaught’

Venice, Italy, Sep 2 (EFE).- Can two cannibals fall in love? Director Luca Guadagnino believes they can, that love can emerge even in the most extreme margins of humanity, and he captures it in “Bones and all”, the odyssey of two youths hungry for human flesh, Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell, with which he hopes to land the Golden Lion, the Venice Film Festival’s top prize.

“I found it inevitable to accept the story of these two vagabonds, of these two identities in search of a form of possibility in the impossible, it’s something that deeply attracted me,” Guadagnino said at the press conference after the premiere of the film.

Chalamet shot to global stardom as Elio in “Call me by your name” (2017) but little or nothing remains of that candor in his new work for the Italian director. In “Bones and all”, the young actor is searching for human flesh and guts, as well as affection.

Guadagnino proposes an authentic “road movie” through the American Midwest, in the style of Jack Kerouac, starring two lonely, abandoned and marginalized young people, Maren (Russell) and Lee (Chalamet), who somehow seem destined to meet and unite as kindred lost souls.

Both feel the same cannibalistic urge as well as the vital need to find a place in the world, to accept their fierce “particularity”, in short: to find their own tribe.

“It’s a story about people who find themselves on a prophecy, on a path that theý can’t get off,” said the American star, who is also the film’s producer.

It is a story about the human need to make a place for oneself in society, despite man’s obsession with judging others since the dawn of time.

It is an issue that the protagonists also perceive and suffer from, especially because of the fame they enjoy in their youth: “To be young now, to be young whenever, I can only speak for my generation, is to be intensely judged,” lamented the 26-year-old actor.

“I can’t imagine what it is to grow up with the onslaught of social media. It was a relief to play characters that are wrestling with an internal dilemma absent the ability to go on Reddit, or Twitter, Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in,” he said.

However, in that online world that tends toward homogenization and almost always rejects anything that crosses the boundary of “normalcy,” it’s still possible to find a place to fit in, he added.

Although Chalamet issued a warning: “It’s tough to be alive now. I think societal collapse is in the air, it smells like it, and without being pretentious, that’s why hopefully these movies matter because that’s the role of the artist is to shine a light on what’s going on,” he warned. EFE

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