Psycho. #11

Caspar on what to hope for from “Italy’s premier hack”.

You wrote a very memorable column in which you detailed your criticisms of Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash (2015) back in 2016. Do you feel as though he has developed as a filmmaker/poet of objectification since then? Do you remain suspicious of his occasionally questionable efforts to draw heavy-handed social commentary into his films?

It’s incredibly sweet of you to have remembered what was, in fact, a blogpost. I only wish I had the luxury of a column, in which to air my grievances with the latest film by Italy’s premier hack (with apologies to also-ran Paolo Sorrentino)! So consumed with my irritation was I that I had to retreat instead to my lowly blog, to bash out the sort of denunciation that no newspaper would ever run. 

I’ve been back to the blog to give it a bit of a re-read, and I’m pleased to see that, in the parlance of our times, she made some points. Maybe a newspaper should have gone for it! After all, the film and the blogpost appeared in the midst of Britain’s most Brexity era, at a time when record numbers of people were drowning in the Mediterranean during their bid to seek asylum in Europe (the movie is set on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria, off the coast of Tunisia). Some other films of this micro-period include Moussa Touré’s La Pirogue (2012), Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx (2018) and Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) — all of which engage with the issue of African migration to Europe in sensitive ways that are matched by resourceful, imaginative filmmaking. My point in my blogpost — I was proper fuming, let’s be honest — was that Guadagnino dishonestly touches upon this incredibly fraught topic in a glib, glancing way, to lend a bit of undeserved gravitas to his vulgar, materialistic enterprise. I think this is morally suspect.