Call Me by Your Name

Have you ever regret­ted not reach­ing out to some­one, or telling them how you real­ly feel? Love makes us do crazy, stu­pid things. It can inspire bold dec­la­ra­tions and unchar­ac­ter­is­tic brav­ery, just as it can stran­gle us with the fear of rejec­tion. In any case, love tends to leave its mark in mys­te­ri­ous ways, and in order to ful­ly under­stand it we must first learn to take the bad with the good.

Based on André Aciman’s 2007 nov­el of the same name, this beau­ti­ful film con­cerns a brief but last­ing romance between a 17-year-old Ital­ian-Amer­i­can boy and a twen­tysome­thing Amer­i­can man who is more expe­ri­enced in mat­ters of the heart but no less sus­cep­ti­ble to its sud­den, all-con­sum­ing desires. The when and where are estab­lished with two hand­writ­ten sub­ti­tles that feel like the open­ing lines of an unself­con­scious­ly earnest teenage con­fes­sion­al. Sum­mer 1983; Some­where in North­ern Italy.

It’s here that Elio (Timothée Cha­la­met) meets Oliv­er (Armie Ham­mer), a hand­some PhD stu­dent who is stay­ing with Elio’s fam­i­ly at their idyl­lic coun­try­side vil­la for six weeks. Dressed in chi­nos, Con­verse and a loose-fit­ting Ralph Lau­ren shirt, Oliv­er cuts a cool, self-assured fig­ure as he intro­duces him­self to Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg) with a firm hand­shake and moth­er (Ami­ra Casar) with a warm kiss on either cheek.

The arrival of a new guest is an annu­al event in the Perl­man house­hold, and so Elio, being the good host that he is, wel­comes Oliv­er by offer­ing to take his bags up to the bed­room which Elio has tem­porar­i­ly vacat­ed, then con­tin­ues his cor­dial rou­tine by show­ing Oliv­er around. But what starts out as yet anoth­er lazy sum­mer spent read­ing books, swim­ming and tran­scrib­ing music under the hot Lom­bar­dian sun quick­ly turns into a jour­ney of self-dis­cov­ery and sex­u­al awakening.

Ini­tial­ly, Elio seems bliss­ful­ly unaware of the chem­i­cal reac­tion that has already been set off inside him, until an inno­cent game of lawn vol­ley­ball trig­gers a deep yearn­ing he sim­ply can­not ignore. Lat­er, when Elio’s moth­er reads aloud to him from a 16^th cen­tu­ry French Renais­sance nov­el about a knight who wor­ries that his love for a princess might be unre­quit­ed, one exis­ten­tial ques­tion strikes a chord: ​‘Is it bet­ter to speak or to die?’ Should Elio express his true feel­ings to Oliv­er or should he keep them bot­tled up? Does he take a leap of faith now or risk liv­ing with the ques­tion of ​‘what if?’ for­ev­er? Being a some­what pre­co­cious, some­what naïve young man, he decides to find out what it means to open one­self up to anoth­er person.

Emo­tion­al­ly speak­ing, this is direc­tor Luca Guadagnino’s most hon­est and intel­li­gent work to date, a lyri­cal, sen­su­ous, aching love sto­ry that skips all the usu­al com­ing-of-age beats in favour of find­ing a gen­tler, less con­ven­tion­al rhythm. There’s none of the brash­ness of his 2016 Eng­lish-lan­guage debut, A Big­ger Splash, nor the stagi­ness of his pre­vi­ous fea­ture from 2009, I Am Love.

Like those films, this one is visu­al­ly rav­ish­ing and filled with erot­ic motifs – nev­er have such mun­dane acts as crack­ing a soft-boiled egg or drink­ing a glass of apri­cot juice been imbued with such pal­pa­ble fris­son. (Inci­den­tal­ly, Call Me by Your Name was lensed not by Guadagnino’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Yorick Le Saux but by Say­omb­hu Mukdeep­rom, whose cred­its include Miguel Gomes’ Ara­bi­an Nights and Apichat­pong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boon­mee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and who recent­ly shot Guadagnino’s upcom­ing remake of Suspiria.)

At one point Elio’s father asks Oliv­er to help him cat­a­logue a set of slides con­sist­ing of ancient Athen­ian sculp­tures, which he describes in amorous, homo­erot­ic terms. If this scene caus­es eye­brows to arch, it’s only because Ham­mer him­self has a body wor­thy of being cast in bronze. Look­ing like Michelangelo’s muse, Oliv­er is a pic­ture of clas­si­cal mas­culin­i­ty, all firm mus­cles and impos­si­ble curves, and Guadagni­no makes sure that it is not only Elio who spends time gaz­ing at his impres­sive form.

Call Me by Your Name was shot on loca­tion just a few miles from Guadagnino’s home in Cre­ma, and he makes no attempt to hide the fact that his affec­tion for the peri­od and set­ting is as strong as his fond­ness for the char­ac­ters. Through­out the film Guadagni­no adorns the already evoca­tive milieu with era-spe­cif­ic pop cul­ture trin­kets – every­one from Phil Collins and Robert Map­plethor­pe to Talk­ing Heads and Fido Dido – which pre­sum­ably must have had some bear­ing on the director’s for­ma­tive years.

In addi­tion to super­fi­cial­ly indulging his own nos­tal­gia, Guadagni­no makes sev­er­al oth­er artis­tic choic­es that speak to his per­son­al influ­ences and tastes, chief among them being the use of two wist­ful bal­lads writ­ten for the film by Suf­jan Stevens, ​‘Mys­tery of Love’ and ​‘Visions of Gideon’, the sec­ond of which plays out over the dev­as­tat­ing final shot.

On a more con­tentious note, it’s worth not­ing Guadagnino’s deci­sion not to show same-sex inter­course. When Elio and Oliv­er do even­tu­al­ly sleep togeth­er, we see them clam­ber onto bed and clum­si­ly undress each oth­er before the cam­era drifts sug­ges­tive­ly towards an open win­dow. It’s sur­pris­ing that, hav­ing spent so long teas­ing this cli­mac­tic union, Guadagni­no should exert restraint in the moment, though in doing so he arguably pre­serves the inti­ma­cy of the scene. Lust may be the spark that ignites Elio and Oliver’s pas­sion­ate affair, yet by not explic­it­ly scratch­ing that par­tic­u­lar car­nal itch Guadagni­no fur­ther empha­sis­es the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of his film’s core themes.

Like the book, Call Me by Your Name will almost cer­tain­ly be cham­pi­oned as a vital queer text, but at its most naked­ly unam­bigu­ous – as when Elio de-stones a piece of fruit with no inten­tion of eat­ing it, or when Marzia (Esther Gar­rel), the local girl with the long-term crush, makes a kind ges­ture just to let him know she still cares – the film is a pro­found study of the dif­fer­ent ways peo­ple, regard­less of their sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, process com­plex phys­i­o­log­i­cal impulses.

All the while there is the nag­ging sense that the sum­mer – and with it Elio and Oliver’s rela­tion­ship – is near­ing its inevitable end. After Oliv­er leaves for Amer­i­ca, a vis­i­bly dis­traught Elio is con­soled by his father, who offers a sage piece of advice that dou­bles as a dev­as­tat­ing eulo­gy for his own squan­dered want. He tells his son not to bury his pain because, as he so elo­quent­ly puts it, to feel noth­ing so as not to feel any­thing is a ter­ri­ble waste. The fram­ing of this scene is cru­cial, as by cut­ting from a two-shot to a close-up of Stuhlbarg, Guadagni­no encour­ages us to reflect on these wise words not just as they relate to Elio but also our own expe­ri­ences of love and loss.

Maybe you’ll recall the vivid sen­sa­tion of your fin­ger­tips ten­ta­tive­ly danc­ing with another’s, or the flush of ner­vous excite­ment which pre­ced­ed that first kiss, or the mourn­ful, lin­ger­ing thought of what might have been had you only spo­ken from the heart.