Felicity Jones Pirouettes Into Cast of Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Swan Lake’
All of a sudden, everybody wants a piece of Luca Guadagnino. The Italian arthouse filmmaker found crossover success with his English-language drama A Bigger Splash (and gave Dakota Johnson the first role of her career actually worthy of her talents) and was crowned the informal king of Sundance for his reportedly outstanding romance Call Me By Your Name. Never one to rest on his laurels, Guadagnino’s currently hard at work on a remake of Italian horror classic Suspiria with Johnson, Tilda Swinton, and Chloe Grace-Moretz, but he won’t even rest on the laurels he’s yet to claim, either.
The Hollywood Reporter got the exclusive that the newly prolific director will next mount his take on seminal ballet Swan Lake, with an A-lister now circling the lead role. THR named Felicity Jones as the odds-on favorite to portray Odette, a princess magicked into a swan (the most desirable of all waterfowl) by an evil sorcerer. The Rogue One star needn’t worry about getting into dance training, however; this retelling would eschew all the ballet business and take instead a “tentpole” approach.
That word gives me slight pause, personally. Guadagnino’s achieved success as the crafter of specific, highly personal visions of people caught in the grips of great emotion. Nobody can blame the man for declining to stage an entire ballet, but the word “tentpole” (and the increasingly aggressive bids from major studios Universal, Paramount and Sony) brings to mind something like the personality-free Alice in Wonderland re-do from Tim Burton. Luca Guadagnino seems incapable of directing a boring movie, and “Swan Lake featuring the internet’s new favorite actress” doesn’t make it sound like he’s going to start, but even so. Consider our bets temporarily hedged.