“Societal collapse is in the air,” actor Timothée Chalamet has said ahead of the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s new “cannibal romance” at the Venice film festival.
The much-hyped Bones and All reunites Chalamet and the Italian director following their 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, which propelled Chalamet into the spotlight and made him the youngest best actor nominee at the Oscars since 1939.
Adapted from Camille DeAngelis’s 2015 novel, Bones and All follows Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Chalamet), a pair of lovelorn flesh eaters who join together for a thousand-mile odyssey through the backroads of rural 80s America. It also stars Mark Rylance, André Holland, Chloe Sevigny and Jessica Harper.
“I can’t imagine what it is to grow up without the onslaught of social media,’ said Chalamet at a press conference on Friday. “It was a relief to play characters that are wrestling with an internal dilemma, absent the need to immediately go on Reddit or Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, to figure out where they fit in.”
“Without casting judgment on that – if you can find your tribe there, then all power. But I think it’s tough to be alive now. Societal collapse is in the air – it smells like it. Without being pretentious, that’s why these movies matter. That’s the role of the artist, or so I’m told – to shine a light on what’s going on.”
Chalamet said the film focuses on “intensely isolated young people, without identity” and that it was made at the height of the coronavirus pandemic when he too felt “cut off from the social contact that helps us understand where we are in the world”.
At Venice’s Palazzo del Cinema, there was notable excitement on Friday as fans camped out along the red carpet to catch a glimpse of Chalamet, who is fast becoming the defining film star of his generation and something of a regular on the festival circuit.
Bones and All is his first producer credit, something he said he hopes to “continue doing and hopefully even make things that I’m not in, that help bring voices and faces to screen that historically don’t get the opportunities so much”.
