3.5 out of 5 stars

Here’s a confession: until earlier this year, I’d never seen The Protagonists, Luca Guadagnino’s first feature, despite becoming increasingly interested in the director. I wasn’t alone in that, of course; it did the festival rounds but barely had a theatrical release at all, although today you can find it on streaming. Even the director tends to dismiss it as a youthful folly (he was in his late-twenties when it was made), and he called it “that crazy film” when accepting a Silver Lion award at the Venice International Film Festival for Bones and All (2022). The Protagonists itself did achieve some small recognition at Venice back in 1999, and it has attracted a few supporters over the years, but audiences and critics both then and later have generally found it baffling, self-indulgent, exploitative, or all three.

It may be one of the oddest films you’ll ever see, and though one of its purposes is clearly to be a meta-commentary on ideas around storytelling and factuality, that’s not all it is. Parts are a straight documentary about a murder. Other parts tell the story of the making of this film—or perhaps it’s the making of another film on the same subject, we’re never completely sure. Still, other parts bear no obvious relation to either of those main threads. Some parts are horrifying and others beautiful. Other parts are grounded, dreamy, and nightmarish. Parts are so ill-judged they stray, surely unintentionally (or maybe not?), into comedic territory.

It’s a jumble of ideas, styles and techniques, and after that first viewing, I genuinely couldn’t decide if it was great or terrible, a four-star movie or a one-star one.

But that alone implies that it’s worth watching and thinking about (even if you come down on the one-star side of the argument). And as for the suggestion that The Protagonists is exploitative—well, sure, it is in the sense that it’s using human tragedy for its own purposes, but given the way that the streaming schedules are so packed with true-crime docudramas (and the bookstore shelves have been so groaning with true-crime paperbacks for even longer), it seems unreasonable to single out this film as an egregious offender.

It may not be hypocritically reverent, but it does take its subject seriously—and the rather long text displayed on-screen at the beginning, ruminating on our reactions to homicide and read aloud by Tilda Swinton, does seem anxious that in focusing on the sensational subject of the murderer, we shouldn’t forget the victim.

The real-life crime at the core of The Protagonists, which was briefly notorious in the UK in 1994, is the murder of Mohamed el-Sayed by Richard Elsey and Jamie Petrolini. They’re not named in the film, apparently on legal advice, but instead referred to as “Billy” (Elsey) and “Happy” (Petrolini).

The two 19-year-old friends travelled from Oxford to London to kill a random stranger, apparently sharing a joint delusion that by doing this they were—in some way—proving their worth to the SAS, the UK’s most famous special forces unit. After failing to find a victim in the sleazy streets around King’s Cross railway station, where they had hoped to target a pimp or a drug dealer, they headed to the Bayswater area and it was there that el-Sayed, a 44-year-old restaurant worker and father, was stabbed to death in his car.

Both men were convicted of murder, although an appeals court later accepted Petrolini’s claim of diminished responsibility and downgraded his conviction to one for manslaughter. Though the case’s notoriety was short-lived—like Guadagnino’s film, you rarely see it mentioned these days—the age of the perpetrators and their apparently offhand attitude toward killing made it stand out at the time. Inevitably, it attracted comparisons to the murder committed by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago in 1924, which became the subject of Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film of the same name; indeed, The Protagonists quietly reinforces the comparison by implying a possible homoerotic aspect to Petrolini and Elsey’s relationship, although this is not central to the film and was not a major feature of the trial as it was with Leopold and Loeb.

At the time of the events covered by The Protagonists, the two murders committed by the brothers Joseph and Erik Menendez in Los Angeles in 1989—a very high-profile case in its day, recently brought back into the public eye by Netflix—would also have been fresh in the memory, and this may have given further resonance to the killing of el-Sayed. Then as now, the UK liked to believe that it was immune from American levels of violent crime while simultaneously drawing doom-laden conclusions from any evidence that it was not, even if they were highly unusual incidents like this one.

Guadagnino’s film, however, is unconcerned with that bigger picture and doesn’t attempt to set the murder of el-Fayed in any broader criminological context. It does make some effort to explore the specific crime, including the life of the victim as well as the background of the perpetrators, but the real-life story is only part of the film’s subject. It’s about Elsey and Petrolini and el-Fayed and the night of the killing to an extent, but it is also about the process of making a movie, the nature and limitations of film and narrative, the way that we consume stories of crime and an awful lot else.

The first, very brief, shot shows two boxers in the ring—violence as entertainment—and then comes the introductory voiceover by Guadagnino’s frequent collaborator Swinton, who appears throughout and ties the film together more than any other individual on-screen. The ideas mentioned here are not immediately explored, however, and the voiceover itself is accompanied by a montage of images so blurred they are effectively abstract. It is then followed by a long song from Jhelisa, who is seen at times but also heard over near-abstract imagery of lights and swaying bodies.

For the first seven minutes, The Protagonists feels very unlike a true-crime documentary, and then it suddenly switches into a completely different and slightly more familiar mode: still images like holiday snaps, vividly coloured, showing a film crew on their way to London, followed at last by some conventional live action as Swinton arrives with her twin babies at the verdant crew house in Highgate, north London.

Is it Swinton, though, or is it a character played by Swinton? The credits of The Protagonists describe her role as “actress”, not “self”, after all. But another actress, Fabrizia Sacchi, is credited as playing “self”. So, maybe we have an actress who is not Tilda Swinton (just played by her) and the actual Fabrizia Sacchi getting together to make a film that is very similar to The Protagonists, but not the same film?

The activities of this film crew take place in 1998 (the year production of The Protagonists began), although they include recreations of the murder that took place in 1994. Whether the crime reenactments we see “take place” in 1998 or a 1998 version of 1994 is open to question—-the key issue is whether we’re watching the film-within-the-film being made, or the film-within-the-film itself—but either way, we’re surely not being asked to suspend disbelief and imagine we are watching the actual crime.

We may be several steps removed from it: watching actors in a real film pretending to be actors in a fictitious film about a real event (which itself was constructed around a complete fantasy). Doubts like this pervade The Protagonists once you stop to think about it—many scenes could be interpreted in several ways, as different combinations of “reality” and “performance”. Trying to establish an exact border between fact and fiction in The Protagonists or figure out how it all fits into Laura Mulvey’s famous theory of cinematic “looks” (accessibly explained here) is enough to make your head spin, and it may be a mistake to assume there is some coherent explanation waiting to be discovered.

If all this makes The Protagonists sound like rather hard work, that’s partly true—fully unpicking the implications of Guadagnino’s games with reality can grow exhausting. Fortunately, though, it’s also possible to escape the philosophical depths for a while and get a lot from The Protagonists on a less complex level.

One reason for the film’s existence is discussed overtly by Swinton: “Something about the level of coldness that the murderers aspired to caught our imagination” (meaning her and Guadagnino). What is it that restrains most of us from killing, but killers lack, for example? And why are we so fascinated by the details of crime? Do we want them to be exotic or banal? The quest to answer some of these questions—which largely remain unanswered—occupies most of the documentary strand in The Protagonists.

There is a visit to the newspaper archive at Colindale in north London. There are interviews with a pair of police detectives, the pathologist who examined el-Fayed’s body, and a reporter who covered the case. He calls the perpetrators “two chemicals which on their own are completely harmless”. There is also a lengthy interview with el-Fayed’s widow, partly about the crime but also about the victim: she recalls his skill in making pasta sauces, for example.

Most of this is done in a fairly conventional style, using interview footage intercut with still reconstructions, but there are several little abstract sequences too, and some scene-setting montages. Later the film’s attention moves to Elsey and Petrolini themselves, played by Claudio Gioè (as “Happy”) and Paolo Briguglia (as “Billy”) in the reconstructions, and to el-Fayed (Andrew Tiernan). The murder itself is shot in several different ways, underlining the pathologist’s point that the evidence supports several possible ways the crime might have unfolded.

On the surface, these segments featuring the two young men and their victim can seem realistic enough, but fantastical elements frequently creep in: the slightly overstated colour schemes and overly simple sets for scenes depicting the killers’ lives before the murder, for example, or the unrealistic plethora of Christmas lights in Billy’s stylised bedroom, or a vampire-like figure appearing briefly in the background. One of the most striking images is one of the most obviously not-real—a blood-streaked Swinton sitting in a car, posing as el-Fayed—and Guadagnino also constantly draws attention to the fact that this is a film by using self-conscious techniques like montage, negative, and what seems to be deliberately low-quality video.

You certainly get the sense of a young director eager to explore as many ideas as he can, both visually and thematically. As a result, The Protagonists is far messier than his later films tend to be; it makes Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), for instance—his almost-three-hour fantasy-extravaganza of ballet, witches, 1970s terrorism and Holocaust aftershocks—seem positively restrained and orderly by comparison. But still, it’s also possible to get a foretaste in The Protagonists of what Guadagnino would go on to produce over the next quarter-century.

We Are Who We Are (2020) and Bones and All, for example, would both focus on pairs of young people. The idea of a young person living in a fantasy world is a central issue in Suspiria (although there the “fantasy” turns out to be quite real), a film which is also concerned with performance and illusion and uses some similar techniques to The Protagonists: rapid cuts suggesting mental disturbance or anxiety, dream sequence imagery.

There’s Guadagnino’s partnership with Swinton, of course; she would go on to star in another three of his features, as well as the documentary short The Love Factory (2002). And the sexual context alluded to in The Protagonists—a very obviously homoerotic locker room/shower scene, the observation that Happy’s “thoughts were forbidden to everybody, particularly to himself”, the grabs and grunts of an actors’ rehearsal for the murder reenactment and the way that Happy and Billy look at each other during it—would become a mainstay of Guadagnino’s work, in films as diverse as that superb, truthful romance Call Me By Your Name (2017) and the colder, more analytical Challengers (2024).

Of course, in such a hugely ambitious, inventive, packed work by a first-time feature director, inevitably not everything is successful. It’s sometimes not clear how things link to the story of el-Sayed, Elsey and Petrolini, or indeed if they do at all: for example, Swinton’s very early line, “all the world loves lovers, all the world loves people in love, isn’t it true?”. Certainly, this could be applied to many of Guadagnino’s later films, but it’s difficult to see how it relates to this one.

There is a bewildering comparison to The Silence of the Lambs (1991) in which “Happy” is likened to both Jame Gumb and Jodie Foster’s Clarice, with “Billy” as Hannibal Lecter; the puppetmaster, I guess.

A reenacted (or imagined) scene where el-Fayed meets his future wife in a ballroom seems parodically romantic, and it’s difficult to know if this is intended or not. In another, crew members move around small boxes onto which photographs have been pasted to show how various London streets relate to one another; perhaps the point is about how photography makes fact into “a story”, but the scene runs the risk of trivialising the reality, and seems very contrived. So does a kind of reenactment or narration or read-through of Elsey and Petrolini’s trial, in the garden of the crew house.

But much else in the film is strangely haunting and powerful, and perhaps the answer to my puzzlement after first seeing it is simply that it has one-star bits and four-star bits. It’s so variegated in style and tone, about so much: authenticity, artifice, performance (including murder itself as performance, almost literally in this case), the way that stories are constructed.

“None of these details are relevant,” Swinton says at one point, pulling the rug from under a basic documentary principle. “We’ve got way too much blood, it’s way too theatrical,” she says at another, asserting that the recreations of an “unspectacular” reality are not accurate. The title itself is ambiguous. The fourth wall is regularly demolished—we see a sound man, a scene ends with “cut”, when Billy has sex with a girl she puts out a hand as if to block the camera—but at the same time The Protagonists slyly erects another, less obvious fourth wall… because even when we think we see the filmmakers, there must be another set of filmmakers filming them.

It’s also, though this isn’t its main intention, a great London film; maybe it took an Italian to capture so evocatively the most international and in many ways least British of British cities. Guadagnino has a keen eye for the unglamorous, everyday aspects of the capital; his camera dwells on the legendary former Scala cinema but also a TGI Fridays, and one long sequence of eye-level footage seemingly filmed from a car is beautiful in its mundanity.

Guadagnino’s next film, due for general release towards the end of this year, is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel Queer starring Daniel Craig. Early reaction to its premiere—like so much of the director’s work, at Venice—was enthusiastic; Rotten Tomatoes’ description of the movie as “phantasmagorical” suggests that even if Guadagnino has become more disciplined (and a tad more commercially aware) since The Protagonists, we can draw an aesthetic line right from his first film to his latest. The Protagonists may not be either great or terrible, but perhaps that’s not the point. It’s a glimpse into the mind of a fascinatingly individual filmmaker, and worth a look for that if nothing else.

ITALY | 1999 | 87 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

frame rated divider retrospective

Cast & Crew

director: Luca Guadagnino.
writers: Luca Guadagnino & Francesco Marucci.
starring: Tilda Swinton, Fabrizia Sacchi, Andrew Tiernan, Claudio Gioè & Paolo Briguglia.