LUCA GUADAGNINO: CINEMA OF APPETITE

Artwork by Jordan Baker

There’s so much you can say by staring at someone while eating a hot dog. It can be flirty, or threatening, tender or humiliating. And Luca Guadagnino understands this better than any working director  today. In Guadagnino’s work food is given power and glory. It isn’t treated as a mere  prop. It performs, brings characters together, or helps them make discoveries about themselves. In his films, food becomes a vocabulary for longing and restraint, for the things his characters want, but can’t name. His cinema is, at its core, a cinema of appetite: bodies hungry for touch, for freedom, for transcendence, for each other. 

Call Me By Your Name’s peach scene is infamous for a reason. It’s erotic, yes, but more importantly, it’s deeply emotional. Elio, played by Timothee Chalamet, stares at the fruit, already imagining Oliver, played by Armie Hammer. The moment is private, desperate, and innocent all at once. Guadagnino gives the peach agency: it becomes the vessel for Elio’s craving, and then, when Oliver discovers him, for Elio’s shame. What’s also so successful  about Luca’s direction here is how closely he honors the emotional blueprint of the book, even though the scene is shorter, and more restrained on screen. He shoots Chalamet in a way that captures every flicker of panic, desire, and embarrassment across his face. Narration is unnecessary, Luca lets  the mise en scène do the talking. The act that begins in fantasy ends in exposure. The peach expresses everything Elio cannot bear to speak: this is how much I want you, and this is how afraid I am of it. Desire, then humiliation. 

Years later in Challengers, Guadagnino shifts from explicit eroticism to something more subtextual. The film follows a love triangle between rising tennis star Tashi Duncan, played by the incomparable Zendaya, and two childhood best friends, Patrick and Art, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. Before the rivalry between the two male leads explodes in adulthood, there is  a scene  where the boys are young, hungry, and sitting together eating churros. Two boys eating churros in a cafeteria should be harmless, but it isn’t. The phallic symbolism is obvious (and kinda hot), but the tension isn’t really sexual, it’s  territorial. The jealous energy between them complicates who is jealous of whom. When Art bites into Patrick's churro, it turns a tiny gesture into a dare. It’s homoerotic and competitive all at once. The churro says what dialogue refuses to: I want what you have, and I want you to see me wanting it. 

And then there is Queer, where appetite becomes something miserable. The film follows Lee, a lonely American expat drifting through Mexico City, who becomes obsessively infatuated with a young soldier named Allerton. Lee is also an addict, both emotionally and literally, and Allerton becomes his latest fixation. Lee wants Allerton with the same hopeless hunger that addicts want to escape. In a desperate attempt to bridge the gap between them, Lee turns to Yagé, a hallucinogenic plant, believing it will give him insight into Allerton’s emotional distance. They eat the hallucinogenic plant together, sharing an experience that briefly ties them to the same dream. The scene is tender because the plant offers Lee a closeness he knows will vanish the moment the high dissolves. Luca’s use of food and  consumption in this film isn’t just desire. In fact, I don’t think desire is what this plant is supposed to reveal at all. Instead, it gives Lee his top of the mountain moment. In a way, it is used to delay an inevitable heartbreak. (And yes, there is that insane cum-swap moment which some could argue takes desire to its most literal, consumable form, but the scene is incredibly directed, and Guadagnino is too elegant to make shock the point, so I digress) In Queer, appetite becomes a method of staying alive. It’s somber and sick: consuming the fantastic to maintain the fantasy.. 

Across these films, Guadagnino returns to the same truth: hunger is human. Hunger is restless. Hunger is the real plot. His cinema reminds us that eating is never just eating. It is wanting and exposing, an engine for shame and restraint. Luca Guadagnino gives glory to food because appetite is the most honest thing about us, and the hardest thing to confess.

Brandon Michael

Artwork by Jordan Baker