Luca Guadagnino’s 1999 feature debut The Protagonists
is in part a sober investigation into and commemoration of a shocking crime
that took place some four and a half years before the making of the movie, in
which two privileged British youths killed Mohamed El-Sayed, an immigrant
they’d never previously met, leaving few clues until one of them confessed a
month or so later: the film includes interviews with some of the investigating
police officers, a medical expert, and El-Sayed’s widow, much detail on the
actions leading up to the crime and several reenactments of the thing itself,
all of which goes to construct an appropriate sense of informed horror. But at
the same time, it frequently has the flavour of a caper movie, showing the group of
young filmmakers flying from Italy to Britain, to work with Tilda Swinton (who
shows up with her two real-life kids) as the figurehead, at times dramatizing
events in a playful or even titillating manner. And further, the final stretch
verges on the (overused as the term may be) Lynchian, setting the duo’s search
for a suitable victim (their original idea was to find and kill a pimp) in an
erotically abstracted environment rather than the low-end dive of reality, introducing a homoerotic
communal shower scene, and imagining the earlier meeting of El-Sayed and his
wife as an urbane, almost Bond-movie-type spectacle. Overall, The
Protagonists feels fresh and engaged and alive, immersed in the streets of
London, in its people and its ideas, in invention and connection and music,
such that one intermittently wonders whether the film is becoming untethered
from its core purpose. But at the same time, it speaks by its very existence to
its immersion in the loss of El-Sayed, and at the end one feels his life has been
elevated, explored and repositioned in the manner normally applied only to the
most revered of the departed.
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