Little White Lies Issue 102

Gently resting his acoustic guitar atop a bench, Elio (Timothée Chalamet) gives Oliver (Armie Hammer) a direction: “Follow me.” And so, Oliver does, leaving the sun-soaked garden and crossing the back door of the Italian manor where he is spending summer as a pupil to Elio’s father, a renowned professor of archaeology. Elio, a talented musician, takes a seat in front of a piano, playing a new variation on Bach’s ‘Allegro’. Oliver protests: “Play that again. The thing you played outside,” to which Elio charmingly retorts, “Oh, you want me to play that thing I played outside?” This brief exchange, at once playful and intense, clarifies not only the undercurrent of desire at the centre of Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 hit Call Me by Your Name but also how desire itself…

It’s 6.59am Pacific Standard Time, and Luca Guadagnino is sat in the passenger seat of a packed car, shades balanced on dome, and looking down into his smartphone to begin our chat. The last time I spoke to the director was on the occasion of Call Me by Your Name’s swift ascent to the deserving status of global sensation, and in the spirit of the film we conversed while Guadagnino did his morning walk around his one-time hometown of Crema, pausing occasionally to greet passers by. The subject now is Challengers, a skillfully-wrought romantic melodrama of the old school that’s set in the world of professional tennis, where the tense ebb and flow of a men’s singles match between Josh O’Connor’s Patrick and Mike Faist’s Art is compounded further by…

We hooked up with the hottest cast of the year to get their post-match analysis and insight on Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. In the film, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist play tennis buddies-turned-arch rivals, Patrick and Art, while Zendaya, who also produced the film, plays Tashi, the would-be champion whose life and career takes an unexpected turn. LWLies: Can you tell us about your first meeting with Luca in person? Zendaya: My first encounter with Luca was at a Fendi fashion show in Rome. We sat next to each other at dinner. I could not speak a word of Italian and was having difficulty explaining that I needed the vegetarian option. He helped me. Josh O’Connor: My first encounter with Luca? I went for lunch with him and my friend Jonathan…

Justin Kuritzkes hacked his way into the public consciousness with a god-tier viral YouTube video named Potion Seller which, if you haven’t seen it already then put this down and watch it now. He expanded his repertoire of dramatic writing and performance with the play, The Sensuality Party, and his 2019 novel, ‘Famous People’, offered an ironic commentary on the inner life of a pop sensation. Challengers is Kuritzkes’ first feature screenplay to make it to the screen, care of director Luca Guadagnino, and he’s also adapted William Burroughs’ ‘Queer’ which Guadagnino has also directed and we may see some time later in 2024. LWLies: How did you come upon writing a film set in the world of professional tennis? Kuritzkes: In the summer of 2018, I happened to turn…

"The glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves.” Not exactly the most flattering portrait of bisexuals, but one which pervades their presence in cinema – so greedy in their obsession with sex, they do not care if they take a man or a woman to bed with them (sometimes they opt for both). Such insatiability can be both the bisexual’s tragedy, and their humour. Noël Coward’s description of his insouciant ménage à trois in the 1932 play Design for Living comes to its farcical conclusion at the end: the curtain falls on the threesome as they fall about with laughter. Despite being a Broadway success, the British censor banned the play from being staged in London until 1939. The…

Though synthesisers as we recognise them today only came into existence in the late-1950s and early-’60s, electronic music has played a vital role in cinema almost since the invention of synchronised sound. Prototypical electroacoustic instruments like the ondes Martenot and the theremin found use in some of the earliest talkie scores; the transitional 1931 Russian sound film Alone, for example, featured theremin warbles as part of a larger orchestrated score composed by none other than Dmitri Shostakovich. As instruments began to evolve, the cost and space demands of early devices made studios one of the few places where one might have access to emerging technology. Thus film music anticipated later commercial electronic recordings and has remained in dialogue with the broader music industry, to the point that composers have shaped…