In between releasing two new features this year (Challengers and Queer), along with shooting another (After the Hunt), Luca Guadagnino has found time to team with Chanel for a new short-film ad. Led by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, who will soon reteam for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, it’s an expectedly stylish endeavor backed by Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo.”
Here’s the synopsis: “In the new N°5 film, See You at 5, Luca Guadagnino’s lens follows Margot Robbie along the roads of California. The story of two lovers’ missed connections, where the road to get there is just as important as the rendez-vous itself. Will there be a rendez-vous waiting at the end of the journey? Or is the rendez-vous itself the journey?”
“Directors and writers, there’s something like their style—it’s distinctly them. Luca Guadagnino being such an example of that as well,” Robbie told Harper’s Bazaar. “Like, you know when you’re watching a Guadagnino film. For so many reasons, he was the perfect director for this shoot, but I think he captures desire in a really incredible way. I think that’s a real hallmark throughout his films, too—characters with desire and finding sensuality. He does that really cinematically, which was nice to be able to incorporate here.”
Leonardo Goi said in his Venice review of Queer, “Where’s the filth? I wrote down the question on page two of my notes, roughly about when Queer entered its second chapter, sending Lee (Daniel Craig) and his young lover Eugene (Drew Starkey) on a quest for ayahuasca in South America. Having spent the first section tracking Lee as he fritters time away in Mexico City, drinking and flirting and sleeping with fellow drifters in neon-soaked motels, this is when the film should get sweatier, dirtier, trippier––long, long before the couple has its first taste of yagé. It’s a chapter that promises to unleash all the pent-up carnality Queer had accrued in its opening scenes. And sure enough, the two men sweat profusely, the journey gets more and more surreal, but the drug-induced paranoias and voracious sex exude the same quality they did in the first segment: a plastic, stylized artificiality. Guadagnino’s brand of sensualism has always courted a certain stilted-ness; even at their horniest, his films always struck me as oddly chaste, the works of a choreographer as opposed to a filmmaker. So again: where’s the filth?”
Watch below, along with a recent Queer Q&A from the 62nd New York Film Festival.