A sublime vision of snow-covered Milan, which had never been shown in film before, in I Am Love (2009) opens Guadagnino’s ‘trilogy of desire’. The filmmaker employed lavish scenes, technical virtuosity, and aesthetical mannerism that reminds Visconti’s Conversation Piece of 1974 to narrate the infighting of a bourgeois Milanese family and an unconventional love story. Quite a different atmosphere is in A Bigger Splash, a quasi-remake of Jacques Deray’s La piscine of 1969. In Guadagnino’s film, everything is more volatile, with references to Malick’s cinema and characters struggling with their inner conflict, unable to show their feelings, and living a life of incommunicability (Antonioni, anyone?).
Guadagnino also studies human relationships in gestures and rituals, digging deep into their personalities in almost manic fashion. Call Me by Your Name, whose screenplay is James Ivory’s adaptation of André Aciman’s novel of the same name, is the peak of his poetry and enjoyed universal critical acclaim.
With Suspiria, the filmmaker works on a rewrite of Dario Argento’s classic: a remake only on paper since there are, in fact, only a few points in common with the earlier film, itself inspired by Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis.