Happy 50th Birthday to Director Luca Guadagnino today! Here's a look back at his little seen sophomore feature
by Jason Adams
For Luca Guadagnino, the process of making his second feature film Melissa P. in 2005 was not a good one. The signs were all there in advance, if he hadn't been lured in by the big American studio Sony that was financing the film -- for one, well, Sony itself. The studio ended up being terrifically intrusive, shoving on a puritanical ending and even hiring an on-set handler for the filmmaker, and he's said he feels the finished project was more their work than his own. But even earlier than that he'd only been able to make it halfway through the novel One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed on which the film was based. A sort of modern The Story of O it tells the loosely autobiographical story of a teenage girl discovering her body alongside a few sado-masochistic tendencies, and he's said he found the book schlocky but that he thought he could patch over those bits with some psycho-analysis. And, of course, Cinema. Always that...
And in the end the finished project that is Melissa P. does feel like a patchwork of compromises and half-laid plans -- kind of a Red Shoe Diaries Jr with a flat Nickelodeon Channel glaze across it -- but for the Guadagnino enthusiast it's still a somewhat fascinating portrait of what lay ahead for him. Failures tell us plenty, and as with many an auteur's early works you can almost always pick out the shimmer of little broken pieces of pottery under their surface -- the sort of thing they'll eventually raise up and make luxurious countertops and water-fountains out of, one blessed day. In just four years Guadagnino would make I Am Love after all, and his reputation as our cinematic sensualist par excellence would become immediate. Melissa P. might not sing, but it hums some notes here and there.
Side-by-side analysis with Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name would probably bear the ripest fruit, as they're both pore-close bildungsroman staring at that spot where a young person's awareness opens up and begins swallowing whole everything around it -- Guadagnino gets his camera so close to both Melissa (María Valverde) and Elio (Timothee Chalamet) as they explore their changing anatomies that you half expect to hear the thunk of a lens smacking against their thighs at several points. Has any filmmaker been so good at capturing the flush of skin; of microscopic hairs fluctuating in the sunlight?
Melissa P. also features the person I consider Guadagnino's most important contributor, his astonishingly talented editor Walter Fasano -- Fasano worked with the director on his very first short (reportedly pornographic) and since has cut all of Luca's feature films, from first 1999's The Protagonists up through Suspiria -- and you can see the two already navigating their sensuous rhythms this far back. They seem to speak the same language -- the way bodies move, and we'll suddenly find ourselves in wet close-up on lips, then eyes, then back as our mind processes everything. They're still finding themselves on this one but the best portions of the film exist strictly on a cutting basis, where the two forget the so-called schlocky story and give this thing a real pulse through the marriage of image and flow.
Also working in the film's favor is the casting of the great Geraldine Chaplin as Melissa's concerned grandmother Elvira -- already having proven himself an ace actressexual by accosting Tilda Swinton at a public event in 1994 in order to get her to star in his movies (and succeeding!) his love of iconic, strong and strange female faces and personalities really pops to life whenever Chaplin's on-screen. There's an entire (probably better) movie happening with that woman, and you can feel his camera longing to follow off that way at times -- Elvira and her willful anachronisms would fit right into in the worlds of all his future films to be, for certain.
The push-pull between Guadagnino's artistic sensibilities and the studio's baser instincts ultimately flatten out the former -- there's often a flat digital-seeming ugliness to the film that reeks of a CW show from the period, which surprised me -- but in fits and spurts the director manages to slip through and find something interesting, some personality, here, all of which will thankfully come gushing up in gorgeous torrents with I Am Love in 2009. If nothing else he was handed a CD of John Adams' music while on the set of this film, so Melissa P. is in its scattershot way a foundational text. A prologue to much prettier things on the horizon.
