“I think it’s infectious to see how people can be connected to their desires.” —Luca Guadagnino
Internationally renowned director Luca Guadagnino made his debut in 1999 with The Protagonists, a crime thriller set in London starring Tilda Swinton. Since then, he has continued to dive deeply into characters’ psyches and the dark waters of desire, love, and horror, portraying intimate relationships with vivid, natural ease. His adaptation of Call Me by Your Name, a sensual and moving vision of secret passions, was nominated for Best Picture at the 2018 Academy Awards. His latest, Suspiria, is a remake of Dario Argento’s classic 1977 horror film and also stars Swinton, his “partner in crime” and most frequent collaborator. With a wide range of influences and inspirations as director and as a frequent international film festival juror, Guadagnino will illuminate his career and complex psychoanalytical narratives, reaching far into the past, present, and future of cinema.
LUCA GUADAGNINO: LOVE AND HORROR
Thursday, January 31–Friday, February 1
Friday, February 8–Saturday, February 9
Walker Cinema
TICKETS
Tickets can be purchased at box office by calling 612.375.7655 or they can be purchased online at walkerart.org/tickets. Limited quantities.
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Retrospective:
Suspiria
Thursday, January 31
Walker Cinema, 7pm
$10 ($8 Walker members, students, and seniors)
Luca Guadagnino tips into perverse horror, reimagining Dario Argento’s 1977 occult classic Suspiria in “six acts and an epilogue set in a divided Berlin.” A young American ballet dancer (Dakota Johnson) uncovers nightmarish evil at a prestigious dance academy. Tilda Swinton plays Madame Blanc, the troupe’s fierce artistic director, and Chloë Grace Moretz is a dancer driven mad by radicals. This dark and hideous vision, in which ecstatic dance and debauched violence reveal the brutality of human nature, is a radically feminine witch tale. Set to a mesmerizing score by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. 2018, DCP, 152 min.
Read more
Hyperallergic on Suspiria
Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria: Desire, Love, and Horror in the Walker Reader’s Crosscuts
Dialogue: Luca Guadagnino and Scott Foundas
Friday, February 1, 8 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members, students, and seniors)
Join Luca Guadagnino and Scott Foundas for a conversation about his international film career, inspirations, and collaborations. Foundas, previously a programmer at the New York Film Festival and a chief film critic for Variety, is now a film acquisitions and development executive at Amazon Studios.
Retrospective:
Luca Guadagnino’s “Desire Trilogy”
February 8-9, 2019, Walker Cinema
$10 each ($8 each Walker members, students, and seniors)
“Each [film] asks what desire is, by exploring what desire makes people do. Each addresses desire’s transformative potential – its consequences for the individual and to the society that individual exists in within the world of the film. Desire has an undulating effect; sometimes it is positive and benign; on other occasions, adverse and damaging. Destruction, Guadagnino understands, is a vital element in the rebirth caused by desire.” —Senses of Cinema
I Am Love
Friday, February 8, 7pm
“I Am Love is an arresting film in many ways, displaying, in parallel with the Recchi family’s theatrical deployment of the trappings of wealth, its own bracing and astringent sense of technique. It’s a high-IQ picture—there are few enough of those— and it’s fascinating, if a little bloodless. A gorgeously costumed and styled piece of work.” —The Guardian
Tilda Swinton plays Emma Recchi, a Russian married into an aristocratic Milanese family, in this “soaringly beautiful melodrama” (New York Times) that follows an Italian family through changing fortunes and passions. Guadagnino portrays the young matriarch emerging through a complicated web of familial bonds to find love against a backdrop of luxurious tapestries, tantalizing food, and ravishing locations. Also a producer on the film, Swinton developed I Am Love with Guadagnino over a period of 11 years. 2009, 35mm, in Italian, Russian, and English, 120 min.
A Bigger Splash
Saturday, February 9, 2pm
“The cinema of seduction doesn’t get much more overheated than A Bigger Splash, an Italian come-on that doesn’t just want to amuse you, but also to pour you a Negroni before taking you for a midnight spin with the top down.” —The New York Times
The dramatic second installment in Guadagnino’s Desire trilogy again features Tilda Swinton, this time as a famous Bowie-like rock star vacationing on a remote Italian island with her filmmaker lover. Their peaceful, passionate bliss erupts when a charismatic record producer/ex-lover (Ralph Fiennes) shows up with a mysterious 22-year-old “daughter” (Dakota Johnson). This powerfully acted psychological thriller follows the free-spirited group as their spontaneous, intimate horrors of honesty, lust, and impulse play out in heavenly, idyllic seclusion. Based on Jacques Deray’s 1969 film La Piscine. 2015, DCP, 125 min
Call Me By Your Name
Saturday, February 9, 7pm
“Call Me by Your Name is a huge step forward for Guadagnino. The story manages to transcend all its genre trappings: This isn’t just a luxurious vacation movie, but it’s still crammed to the gills with gorgeous shots of the Italian countryside and Elio’s family home. This isn’t just an erotic drama, and yet the love scenes are all choreographed with care. And most importantly, this isn’t just a coming-of-age tale, but the ardor Elio and Oliver have for each other feels utterly vital, as if every touch will be seared into their memories.” —The Atlantic
Set in a 17th-century Northern Italian villa, Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sensuous love affair that awakens over the course of the sun-drenched summer of 1983. Timothée Chalamet plays Elio, a precocious 17-year-old waiting to explore and share the secrets of love. When Elio’s archeologist father invites his 24-year-old American grad student (Armie Hammer) to move in to their home to study, a relationship develops. They find themselves increasingly distracted from the heady, abundant beauty of classical music, Italian food, Greco-Roman culture, and gorgeous countryside to be consumed by their mutually arousing desire. Based on the novel by André Aciman. 2017, DCP, in English, Italian, French, German, and Hebrew, 132 min.
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