Review of After the Hunt by Luca Guadagnino

(tic) The film opens with a clock. A dry, precise, irritating sound like a concept not yet clarified.

(toc) It is academic time, the one that measures not hours but guilt. Julia Roberts – impeccably cut white jeans, professorship in philosophy, a blond Bergman and the look of someone who has read too much to sleep peacefully – is the

Professor Alma. The husband is a Jewish psychiatrist, vaguely homosexual in my opinion. On the bedside table, I Buddenbrook di Thomas Mann.

And there it begins After the Huntthe new film by Luca Guadagnino, which is not just a story about power and consensus – it is, as a logical friend would say, a closed system that believes itself to be open. An exercise in moral style. A film that does not denounce, but he reflects.

Guadagnino is – in no uncertain terms – the Best Italian Alive. Because he doesn’t tell stories: the sets up. He is the only director capable of bringing Agamben and Piero Ciampi together in the same film – and making it seem natural that one thinks the same. bare life while the other sings with an empty glass.

The soundtrack seems to have come out of an autumn night discussing Kierkegaard with a gin and tonic in hand: strings, The Smithsand university café jazz. All around, everyone is beautiful. Andrew Garfield – Ralph Lauren shirts, smile of an assistant in career crisis – interprets male perfection as an aesthetic category of danger. His every gesture is calibrated, as if he knows that the camera is the only God left.

Everything is calibrated, everything is beautiful. Too Handsome. And therein lies Guadagnino’s coup: the morally suspect aesthetic. Showing how even justice, when it passes through beauty, risks becoming design.

Agamben would say that we are in a state of moral exception: when the law is silent and only aesthetics remains to speak. In After the Hunt no one is pure, but everyone is well dressed. Responsibility is no longer a value: it is a role to play. Everyone performs their ethical position as if it were an academic outfit – intellectual, appropriate, reversible. And in this Guadagnino touches on the most contemporary truth: ethics as a look.

For me, who studied philosophy, it is a familiar scene. It was exactly this, at the beginning: believing that thought could have an elegant form. That a good idea needed a good jacket. Of tweed, obviously. (Digression on me: I don’t know if it was snobbery or faith – but at the time I was certain that the only possible ethic was elegance. Or at least the posture of grace in the face of chaos).

After the Hunt it is precisely this: a film that does not moralize, but put the thought down. It happened at Yale, yes. This is how the film opens; an irresistible remote past written in that Woodyallenian font.

Ma – (tic) – as always, it was already happening inside us.

Thank you Luca for making this film, I love you!