Sun-soaked Sensuality: Luca Guadagnino’s Desire Trilogy
There are perhaps few better at engaging all the cinematic senses than Luca Guadagnino. In his Desire Trilogy (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name), the Italian filmmaker shows off the sensual delights of summer and the intangible nature of memories. Each film beginning with music that immediately overwhelms the ears, Guadagnino revels in the all-consuming nature of desire. Whether inhabiting the perspective of a Russian emigré, a retired rockstar, or a teenage boy, each film in this trilogy builds an aesthetic reliant on human sense experience.
In the first of the trilogy, I Am Love, Tilda Swinton stars as Russian emigré Emma Recchi, the wife of a wealthy Milanese businessman. Fulfilling the role of dutiful wife, she watches as her husband and son are chosen to carry on the family business, hosting a dinner on a beautiful, snowy evening. Once warmer weather arrives, Emma’s sense of desire takes over when her son befriends young chef Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini). The moment she first eats his food, her head tilts back in pleasure, the surrounding conversation is muffled, and the viewer feels Emma come to life for the first time. Each film in the trilogy has an instigating moment where desire takes control and changes the course of action. In Emma’s case, it presents as a taste of food that brings her to life and expands her curiosity.
Her path further collides with Antonio’s one weekend away as the two begin a passionate affair. While the story may seem simple enough, Guadagnino’s dreamy aesthetic is the emotional core of his work. Before Emma and Antonio ever touch, his food and words live in Emma’s mind, taking over the screen at times. Emma’s desire is represented by Antonio’s words repeating over and over, Italian summer scenery passing by, an amalgamation of memory and movement. By the time the characters finally come together, it is a collision of the senses as the screen is consumed by clips of their intertwined bodies alternating with images of blossoming flowers. Nature and human desire are in sync.
Guadagnino’s structure is brilliant at encapsulating desire because it engages all the senses. While American films tend to skew more literal in terms of sexual desire, the Italian pleasure for life is strong in Guadagnino’s work. Emma tells Antonio she learned to be Italian when she first arrived from Russia. This learned Italianness extends to laying in the grass, eating a flavorful meal, and allowing desire to extend to every facet of life. Her Italian family, eager to do business with the English, seems to have lost their sense of delight in their cold home, a place of little to no desire. In this trilogy, love seems to only flourish under the sun. The poolside in the summer is the setting for a tender mother-daughter moment later becomes the scene of tragedy. During winter, Emma is confined to her lonely, large home until summer ignites her again. It is only once Emma uses desire as a vehicle for identity that she finally cuts her hair, leaps into her lover’s arms, and finds a way back to herself.
In Guadagnino’s follow-up, A Bigger Splash, Tilda Swinton returns in a surprising role as Marianne, a rockstar recovering from vocal surgery with her younger lover Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) on the Italian island of Pantelleria. Visually inspired by the 1967 Hockney painting of the same name, Marianne’s home is an ideal getaway in stark contrast with the rocky nature of the island. In Hockney paintings, pools are surfaces broken in the name of desire, bodies plunging into the cold water. While his other pool paintings typically include nude male swimmers, “A Bigger Splash,” only implies the presence of another body.
Guadagnino sets the tone for another film of sensual summer drama when Harry (Ralph Fiennes), Marianne’s former lover and producer, shows up with his young daughter (Dakota Johnson) to win her back. While the sexual tension moves between the four central characters, Harry continually disrupts the peaceful nature of the island. Marianne is mute while Harry screams and blasts old records.
Marianne and Paul make a stunning and unexpected couple. Her short hair and Bowie-esque features coupled with his athletic build and sensitive nature is compelling. The two lounge around, barely able to stop touching one another, perfectly at ease in the pool.
In a similar vein with I Am Love, desire and danger are intimately intertwined. As Harry and Marianne continue to reconnect, Paul’s patience with him wears thin and another poolside tragedy takes place. The swimming pool, a place of desire and communion in the sun becomes the site of violence at night. Ultimately, Marianne and Paul exist in a state of rich, white impunity while refugees arrive to a police presence on the very same land.
While it is easy to believe that Guadagnino promotes a hedonistic lifestyle given the sensual indulgence on the screen, the films find their edge when desire comes into conflict with reality. For Emma, this is when her love puts her relationship with her son at risk. For Marianne and Paul, all is fine until their vacation is interrupted. In the final installment, Call Me By Your Name, the limits of summer are clearer than ever.
Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) is used to spending summer in Italy with his polyglot professor parents. Each summer, his father hires an assistant who arrives and leaves without having much impact. But in the summer of 1983, Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives and Elio must learn to trust himself. Guadagnino explores, perhaps most deeply, the ways in which we are taught to ignore our innermost desires and leave them behind once the summer ends.
Based on André Aciman’s novel, Elio and Oliver’s story begins with a touch. Oliver, whose body is described to resemble a statue, is playing volleyball when he walks over to Elio and briefly massages his tense shoulders. Elio quickly reacts and turns away from him. This touch begins Elio’s obsessive spirals where he questions his every move around Oliver, whom he finds arrogant at first. It is not the immediate attraction that Emma experiences when eating Antonio’s food, or the highly sensual, established bond of Paul and Marianne. Elio experiences love for the first time, doubting it every step of the way until finally discovering his discomfort is desire.
Similar to Guadagnino’s representation of Emma’s interiority, sentences Elio writes in his diary echo through the home and stir behind his eyes. Unlike the first two films in the trilogy, the central romance is not heteronormative. Elio’s struggle to identify his feelings for Oliver and Oliver’s signs of interest stems from his inability to see himself as desiring another man. While the adults in Elio’s world are not homophobic, the story is set during the early years of the AIDS crisis when homosexuality was considered abnormal and a possible death sentence.
Despite this socio-political backdrop, Guadagnino’s continual use of summer vacation as a separate world where inhibitions fall away gives Elio and Oliver the space to fall in love. Even Elio’s father spends his time studying ancient statues of idealized male bodies. As Elio and Oliver dance around their attraction, Mr. Perlman invites both of them to see old statues in the water surface. The bodies slowly rise above, revealing themselves limb by limb. Once on the beach, Elio slowly traces his hand along the statue’s lips, watching his finger the entire time. It is clear this is how he wants to touch Oliver, but his desires are safely expressed in this scene. Moments later, Elio reaches out and shakes the arm of a statue extended by Oliver. Both men, at some level afraid, have found a way.
When Elio finally reveals his feelings to Oliver, he is indirect and claims he does not “know about the things that matter.” Oliver asks why Elio is sharing this with him and Elio responds, “Because I wanted you to know.” As that last sentence repeats and repeats, the two walk the perimeter on opposite sides of a fountain until they meet, looking each other in the eye. Elio’s innocence is striking. It seems as though he is still unsure of what he truly wants from Oliver, but he at least understands his urge to share himself.
Later that same day the two share their first kiss at Elio’s favorite spot. They walk in the water when Elio starts lightly punching Oliver’s back. Elio always moves towards Oliver in an apprehensive way, still unsure how to express his desires. As Elio’s confidence grows, Oliver starts to doubt his intentions. Once they finally get together, Oliver admits the touch during volleyball was a sign and Elio’s reaction scared him off. Chalamet portrays Elio brilliantly, always lunging towards Oliver in a clumsy and endearing way.
Before the summer ends and the two inevitably part, Elio and Oliver go away for a weekend together. Running through the streets and embracing without fear, it seems too good to be true. As Elio sleeps, his dreams are depicted by color inverted footage of their final days. Elio’s mind is already idealizing the relationship before it ends. His dream is a kind of supercut of a summer Elio will treasure for the rest of his life.
Winter eventually comes and Elio’s idealized summer becomes bittersweet. Like Emma and Marianne, Elio understands that sun soaked days belong to the past. Guadagnino’s desire trilogy, consistent in its dreamy aesthetic, pays tribute to the power of summer sensuality while embodying its fleeting fluorescence.
