The exclusive fashion series by Luca Guadagnino, director of "call me by your name", for Man number<

Italian cinema has long looked back to its flamboyant past, scratching its head, perplexed by so many misguided beauties. The world was also asking itself the question, wondering how the country of Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Mario Monicelli and a few other unforgettable figureheads, this veritable creative oasis which had marked the post-war period, had been able to fall in some form of oblivion. Apart from Nanni Moretti, who had become too rare, contemporary cinema did not really count on Italy, which everyone agreed had lost its formula. Perhaps it took a man with broad desires to question this strange transparency. A Sicilian? Why not. Luca Guadagnino was born near Palermo in the very early 70s. He became one of the most acclaimed directors of the moment, his film was nominated four times (and awarded for best screen adaptation) at the 2018 Oscars for the indie hit Call Me by Your Name, before rocking the last Venice Film Festival, where he presented his remake of Dario Argento's mythical Suspiria on the lagoon. International by nature – he has been sailing between Milan and New York for a long time – constantly outside the codes, the forty-year-old has put his country back on the map almost single-handedly. A titanic job.

Luca Guadagnino started like everyone else, that is to say at the bottom of the ladder, booed by critics for his inaugural feature film, The Protagonists, released in the late 90s. enough to discourage this tenacious boy. He had already managed to catch the attention of Tilda Swinton, who starred in it. Brought together by their common love for Derek Jarman – the actress had shot her second film, Caravaggio, with the late English director, a figure of gay cinema – the two forged a relationship based on the love of margins. They are found in almost every film, where Swinton embodies a mysterious and powerful femininity with remarkable persistence. In Suspiria, the Englishwoman plays the choreographer of a dance company, with harsh methods and twisted fantasies. Madame Blanc is scary. Through her, the film finds the madness necessary to fully exist and capture the extreme moments of human experience.

The project comes from afar, even if it may surprise. We remember the summery and sensual atmosphere of Call Me by Your Name, the delicate love story between a teenager and a thirty-year-old in an Italian bourgeois house , in the mid-1980s. Timothée Chalamet revealed his sense of romantic seduction, to the point of becoming the icon of an era in search of new male figures, of a less ferocious virility. Everything seemed to slide under the Italian sun, even the wounds of love. Here, the atmosphere is on the contrary cold, dangerous, morbid, because Suspiria tells the story of the criminal exploitation of young girls in the purest tradition of the giallo, the bloody horror film made in Italy, of which Dario Argento was one of the masters. Is it the same man who directed both films? The main interested party sees no problem with this radical contrast. It's as if it were part of him, without creating a caesura. “Things are never what they seem. In life, we make decisions that make sense to us, while to others they seem strange. In reality, I didn't go from Call Me by Your Name to Suspiria, it's the opposite. I can explain to you.” The facts seem stubborn: Suspiria was produced in the wake of Call Me by Your Name. But Guadagnino speaks from another point of view. A few years earlier, he had shot another remake, that of La Piscine, the sixties drama by Jacques Deray with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. This feature film, released in 2015, was called A Bigger Splash, in undisguised homage to the imagination of David Hockney, and featured, in addition to Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson and Matthias Schoenaerts. But the director's desire for Suspiria already existed. “I formed the project to adapt Dario Argento's film a long time ago. For the past five years, I have devoted a lot of energy to trying to make it possible. For Call Me by Your Name, it was very different, since I was not supposed to direct the film written by James Ivory. I finally accepted at the last moment, while I was preparing Suspiria. In my head, I really went from A Bigger Splash to Suspiria.

“Actually, I didn't go from Call Me by Your Name to Suspiria (...) I really went from A Bigger Splash to Suspiria.”

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The other surprise consists in seeing Guadagnino take an interest in a universe which we did not suspect was familiar to him: baroque horror cinema, where moments of violent bravery cannot be avoided. Here again, the filmmaker sheds light on himself, evoking his immoderate love for Dario Argento's masterpiece. “Those who know me well know that I have always been completely devoted to the genre. I grew up loving horror movies and always wanted to make them. So, for me, it is only natural to direct the remake of such a celebrated film. When I saw it, Suspiriam taught me that anything is possible in the way of presenting a story. That for me was the biggest lesson of this movie.” LeSuspiriad’Argento functioned as a long cry of images and sounds, almost without limits, where the staging of violence against women was a matter of fetishism. The version that Guadagnino offers is marked by its constant desire to go beyond mannerist reproduction to find its own rhythm, its singular obsessions. The fetishism is less marked and, although the story turns out to be structured in the same way (the aftermath of the arrival of a new girl in a prestigious dance venue, where a young girl has just been murdered), the film deploys a rather astonishing historical dimension, an atmosphere of the end of the world which directly echoes our time, even if the action takes place four decades earlier. “With screenwriter David Kajganich, we wanted to think about a year – 1977, when the original film was released – and a place – Berlin. We were looking to feel the climate there and at that time, something that would have to do with the consequences of the history of the first half of the 20th century. Intense paranoia.”

The wounds of a terrible European history open, gaping, in this Suspiria new way, thanks in particular to a character of a tired psychoanalyst, an old man still in mourning after the disappearance of his wife in East Germany several decades previously. But the heart of the film is indeed the jolts imposed on the body of a few women, in particular the heroine, interpreted by the incredible Dakota Johnson. Without revealing the plot, we will say that the dance scenes which put it forward at length work in depth the idea that the movements of the body are linked to the deepest fears of the mind. The daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith finds a way here to explode the clichés that may have been associated with her after the sluggish Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy. The actress admitted to being deeply haunted by her experience on the set of Suspiria. Luca Guadagnino does not comment, preferring to highlight the intensity of their relationship for their second collaboration, after A Bigger Splash. “Dakota Johnson went very far for this film. We have a very intuitive relationship, we understand each other without the need to constantly go into detail. The trust between us is mutual. I know she is a courageous woman, who has the desire to explore the complexity within her. That's the reason why I love him so much. All my films have revolved around strong female characters, that appeals to me enormously.”

Before speaking to Luca Guadagnino, we had received some kind alerts portraying a difficult man, reluctant to explain his work. This moment did eventually arrive, at the turn of a question about his style. How to define him, he who makes such different films as well as several remakes? The first response seemed mechanical: “I always try to get fully involved, I don't make movies because it's a job. I express my vision of the world and of myself, I hope that people can guess which without me necessarily having to explain myself. There followed an icy silence, and a few more complicated minutes... before the subject returned to the table. “Are you asking me how to define my style? To begin with, I don't really understand the concept of style in cinema. For a director, it is more important to think in terms of form and language. The style has perhaps more to do with the surface, something a little superficial.” If the answer remains incomplete, it offers some keys on the vision of the art of the boy, who refuses to be reduced to the vista of his staging and advocates a certain mystery. His films are interrelated even if they do not always look alike. So what ? In this, Guadagnino has everything of a classic, going against a time when “meta” approaches and the use of quotation have become legion. Like many, he cultivates the feeling of coming later, but without making it an insoluble problem. When asked about the idea of ​​​​the necessarily risky remake of a monument of cinema, he answers in a simple and powerful way: "I tried to be inspired by the freedom of Suspiria, without making a copy."

“Guadagnino has everything of a classic, running counter to an era when “meta” approaches and the use of quotation became legion.”

If Guadagnino insists on this idea, it is as much to defend his inventiveness as to clarify his conception of what a film should do to those who watch it: open their eyes and ears to a world new. “When I create, I try to remember the emotional shocks given to me by works, the visual experience of a painting or a film. I like to think outside the box and share the reflection with my collaborators, with whom I have worked for a long time. For Suspiria, we looked at Balthus' paintings a lot, in order to understand the kind of light and colors we wanted. We also wanted to find a state of mind linked to certain artistic experiences of the seventies. The subject of the film is the conflict between the irrational and the rational, the way in which the irrational can explode our rational life. What happens when the two collide?

This telescoping, it is possible to feel it with Suspiria without seeing it as a substitute from another time. If the result is necessarily surprising, sometimes flirting with kitsch, Luca Guadagnino expresses his desires freely. "I can't make a film other than having total control," he explains soberly. The message is clear, just like the rejection of the melancholy that would like the greatness of cinema to be behind us from now on. “I try not to be a nostalgic person. Above all, I am looking for connections and, when I see certain films such as those from the new European or Japanese waves, French cinema from the 1960s, young Dutch directors from the 1970s, New British Cinema, I feel this connection. I try to find it and integrate it into my cinema, but that has nothing to do with nostalgia. Besides, I see a lot of films from all eras, I'm not a snob. When it comes to evoking the place of cinema in a world where images flood in from everywhere, calling into question the central and dominant character of the big screen, Guadagnino becomes prolific. “It’s interesting to understand its place in today’s creation. You have to be careful not to stay stuck on your own perspective, but on the contrary to reach an overhang, beyond judgment. Today, images are perceived differently, cinema is no longer alone. This is a major question. I can't answer it too quickly. Let’s say I grew up in a climate where many said that this art was dying. ‘Cinema is dead. Cinema is dead. Cinema is dead.’ They were all repeating that. Once, it was because of the TV; another, because of VHS or DVD. Now we are talking about VOD and streaming. And yet, we are still collectively looking for stories, stories, to understand our lives a little better. So cinema doesn't really look dead to me." Looking at Luca Guadagnino's schedule remains the best way to convince yourself, even if he is credited with many international projects with desirable stars – Rio, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams; a version of Swan Lake; a thriller with Jennifer Lawrence; a sequel to Call Me by Your Name... – doesn't seem elated at the idea of ​​working non-stop. “If I'm honest, my dream would rather be to retire. The idea of ​​adding more work to what I am accumulating sends shivers down my spine. I hope I will have the opportunity to retire. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do now. I want to produce, create... and cultivate my garden. For the moment, I confess to you, I do not have a garden yet [laughs].”