Luca Guadagnino’s Fascination with the Bourgeoisie

Though perhaps best known for their portrayals of desire, Luca Guadagnino’s character-driven dramas, from “Challengers” to “Call Me by Your Name,” also evince an abiding preoccupation with the customs of the rich. As Nathan Heller wrote of “I Am Love,” his films often revel “in bourgeois beauty and comfort—genuinely, fully, without ideological disdain—as a groundwork for critique.” Guadagnino—whose latest film, “Queer,” was just released—recently shared a reading list of his perennial favorites on this theme which reflect, as he put it, “how class exerts its own dynamics of power, dynamics of control, dynamics of seduction, and dynamics of nurturing.” His remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Complete Bocuse

by Paul Bocuse

This is a recipe book by a gentleman, Paul Bocuse, who is hailed as the greatest French chef—or maybe the French people would say the greatest chef—of the twentieth century. He operated in and around Lyon, where he was from, all his life, and where he had one of the longest-standing three-Michelin-star restaurants.

Bocuse made traditional French cuisine, but he did it in a different way, making it less heavy and less inedible for contemporary people. His cooking was a bridge between an idea of the past, which came from royalty and then became bourgeois cuisine, and modernity. His book is really a picture of a world between two worlds—the very ancient past, and a present that is now the past for us.

I read it all the time because I cook all the time. I’m like my father—though he didn’t like Bocuse, because he found the recipes too complicated and completely not right for our way of eating. When I started using the book, I always had fights with my father because, first of all, he didn’t want me to occupy his kitchen, and also, when you cook French, you have to use a lot of butter and cream—expensive ingredients.

My father died in 2020. In his last week or so, he suddenly asked me to cook for him. I made a bisque from this book, and I brought it to the hospital, where I spoon-fed him, and he was very happy. Two or three days later, he passed. It was very sad. But now that I can talk about it, I think it was also very beautiful that we could finally find an agreement on who was cooking.

Buddenbrooks

by Thomas Mann

This great novel, which Thomas Mann wrote in his early twenties, published in 1901, and got the Nobel Prize for Literature for, describes the fortunes of one family through four generations, between 1835 and around 1875.

The first part, famously, is basically a forty-page description of a housewarming party and everything that happens there. There’s all this food—which, at the time, in order to represent the power and culture of the class, was heavily influenced by French cuisine. That brings us back to Bocuse—I like thinking of him as a sort of rabdomante of the codes of behavior and control which you can find in societies like that of the high bourgeoisie depicted by Mann.

Mann was interested in the decadence of the bourgeoisie, and he cast the kernel of repression as the bomb at its center. That basically came from his own family’s experiences. In “Buddenbrooks,” the character of Thomas Buddenbrook, who is the heir to the family fortune, ends up destroying it because he cannot reconcile his inescapable duty to manage the family’s wealth and the need he feels to go away from it. He has to repress himself in order to be dutiful, and this repression is a blind worm that consumes him from the inside.

The Man Without a Face

by Masha Gessen

This is a beautifully wise book by an incredible intellectual for whom I have complete worship. It came out in 2012, and it is astounding for the piercing wisdom that it shows many years before there was a consensus that Putin would become the nationalist autocrat that he is today.

What I love about it is that Gessen creates a labyrinthine portrait of Putin in the first-person singular, talking about themself and the way in which Putin had an impact on their life. Gessen investigates their own Russianness by dealing with this figure who is almost a man without qualities at the beginning—who comes from the same place, the same Soviet Union, but goes in a different direction.

To me, the book feels linked to “Buddenbrooks” because Putin embodies the dynamic potential of repression as an act: repressing opponents, repressing freedom of speech, repressing thought. And it feels linked to Bocuse, too, because one has to think that power eats a lot, and power represents itself in the dynamics of hosting. I like the idea that, unaware of it, Bocuse was transmitting ideas about power his whole life—whether it was by hosting dinners in his restaurant or by propagating the cult and culture of hosting, and the fascination of being within the boundaries of the haute bourgeoisie. Anyway, I don’t want to sound pretentious or random, but, somehow, I see these three as beautiful books that send me ping-ponging between themes that I’m very close to.