On November 2, director Luca Guadagnino’s newest film, Suspiria—a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 cult classic—will hit theaters nationwide. As the Walker prepares for a Halloween night screening of Argento’s original, and in advance of Guadagnino’s February 2019 visit to Minneapolis for a Walker Dialogue and Retrospective, we present perspectives from Walker Moving Image staffers, connecting the dots between the two films. As a companion to Kelsey Bosch’s view of the Argento original, here’s Deborah Girdwood’s look at Guadagnino’s homage.
Luca Guadagnino claims that his soon-to-be-released Suspiria, a loosely reimagined remake written in collaboration with David Kajganich (A Bigger Splash), “pays tribute to the overwhelming impact that the original had on him at the age of thirteen,” according to the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane. He repeatedly tells the story of his first encounters with Suspiria, saying that he was drawn to the film ever since he saw its arresting poster—depicting a ballerina with a severed head and blood dripping down her body—outside a closed local movie house at the age of 10. He later saw the film alone, at home, on TV. “It was a landmark of his own coming of age,” writes Nathan Heller—and he refers to it as the most personal film he has made to date.
Born in Italy to a Sicilian father and an Algerian mother in 1971, Guadagnino spent his early childhood in Ethiopia, before moving to Rome to study cinema. He became obsessed with Swinton after seeing Derek Jarman’s Carravaggio (1986), and the pair met years later, in 1994, when he spotted her in the crowd at an art event and approached her to offer her a role he’d written for her in a short film (never made). With persistence, and after a move to the UK to work with her, they collaborated on his first feature, a London crime thriller and experimental re-creation of a motiveless murder by two affluent students based on a true horror story, The Protagonists (1999). Ever since, Swinton has remained Guadagnino’s dearest and closest collaborator.
Swinton worked with Guadagnino again, starring in and coproducing his arthouse breakthrough, I Am Love (2009), the first in his “desire trilogy,” a melodrama featuring a wealthy Milanese family. Referring perhaps to an erotically charged scene with her character and a plate of prawns, Swinton reveals, “He and I often talked of forging what I call a ‘sense’-ationalist’ cinema, a cinema you can taste and smell and feel in a bath of environmental experience.”
An auteur, Guadagnino controls every aspect of production, from location, casting, writing, art direction, wardrobe, music, to cooking lavish meals for cast and crew. On set, actors describe his working environment as liberated from hierarchies, flowing, having a vibe described by Armie Hammer as “vacation mode.”
In 2016, Guadagnino directed his Oscar-nominated Call Me By Your Name, which stars Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer as lovers in a sun-drenched 17th-century villa in the north of Italy, set over the course of a youthfully romantic summer in 1983. Having written his thesis on Jonathan Demme, Guadagnino suggested that Hammer look to Jeff Bridges in Something Wild (1986) as inspiration for Call Me By Your Name’s carefree ’80s dancing scene. He also recruited a local Italian, Vanda Capriolo, who played the film’s housekeeper character, for his coming Suspiria.
Swinton has been developing Suspiria with Guadagnino for more than a decade, but they’ve been discussing it ever since they met. Also obsessed with the original, Swinton shared Guadagnino’s fantasy of an homage, and they gathered cast and crew in an art nouveau hotel on a mountaintop outside of Varese to begin filming Suspiria just months after he completed Call Me By Your Name. As lead witch, Swinton’s character exudes feminine power and the threat of wielding creativity and beauty as a destructive, painful force. They explored themes of motherhood and the power dynamics stirred up by a new female arrival. Describing Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson as not just muse-collaborators but as sisters, Guadagnino transgresses in the face of those who flocked to his “desire” films for their style and beauty and vividly demonstrates the fascinating and uncompromising psychological and physical edge between love and horror, at last going into the compelling and darker complexities of female artistic identity that he’s yearned to express throughout his adult life.
“The witches are back.”
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Lutz Ebersdorf (Tilda Swinton) in Suspiria
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