Call Me by Your Name (2017)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
In the summer of 1983, a 17-year-old Elio spends his days in his family's villa in Italy. One day Oliver, a graduate student, arrives to assist Elio's father, a professor of Greco-Roman culture. Soon, Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.
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Elio’s attraction to Oliver—and Oliver’s to Elio—is laid out delicately by Guadagnino, who adapted Aciman’s book with Walter Fasano and none other than __James Ivory __ (whose Maurice is nodded to throughout).
Embracing the spirit, if not the letter of Aciman’s novel, Guadagnino and co-writers Walter Fasano and James Ivory (of the Merchant Ivory dynasty that brought us “Maurice” and “A Room With a View”) have resituated the action ever so slightly to Lombardy.
Written by James Ivory (the director of films like “Maurice” ), “Call Me by Your Name” progresses through evasions and encounters, with Elio advancing, Oliver receding and their circling narrowing.
It’s tempting to speculate how Ivory, who, as the director of “ A Room with a View ” (1985) and of “ Maurice ” (1987), showed his mastery of Italian settings and of same-sex romance, might have fared at the helm of the new film.
Screenwriter James Ivory, now almost 90, tackled more subdued versions of these themes, often in sun-dappled period Italy, during his fabled partnership with the late Ismail Merchant (in Maurice and Room With a View , for example).
El filme -escrito por James Ivory (Maurice, 1987) a partir de la novela de André Aciman-, es un romance maduro, pero también es una historia de crecimiento; es una propuesta tan gentil, sensible y observadora centrada en dos personas que encuentran una conexión profunda.
In a recent interview with The Guardian , Hammer revealed that Guadagnino showed him a few minutes of Debra Winger in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990) to inspire him for this scene, and that was clearly an ideal choice.
(Another Bertolucci technique; think of the opening shot in The Sheltering Sky, when Kit and Port emerge from behind a complex wooden structure in the desert.)
There are other significant but subtly deployed props in Call Me by Your Name, starting with the Ray-Ban sunglasses perched precariously on Elio’s always-tilted head—a clever way of reminding that the film is set in 1983, the year of Risky Business.
Taking inspiration from any number of works about beautiful European youths with good style and hearts full of longing—most explicitly Proust, as well as Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours — Guadagnino’s film drops us “somewhere in Northern Italy” in 1983, where 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is lounging at his parents’ villa just as a summer apprenticeship reels in the improbably handsome American grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer) to study with Elio’ss father (Michael Stuhlbarg).
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Set in 1983, director Luca Guadagnino’s love story calls to mind another romantic coming-of-age film set in northern Italy: Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 epic Stealing Beauty.
“Call Me by Your Name” joins the same continuum of other blissful set-in-Italy American vacation/romance porn such as “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Chocolat,” “Stealing Beauty,” “Letters to Juliet,” “Under the Tuscan Sun,” etc. Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom knows how to catch a scene so that you can almost feel the temperature in a room, and the subtle shifts between indoor and outdoor light, between humid afternoons and hot clear nights, pass over the screen in an absolutely palpable way.
Compared with Beloved or any number of films dealing with down-to-earth sexual feelings that go wild — whether Last Tango in Paris , Stealing Beauty , Being 17 , or this year’s Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo — Call Me By Your Name is trite.
The world depicted here is so glossily perfect that this feels like a film less about life than about lifestyle—not unlike a similar long-hot-Italian-summer movie, Stealing Beauty by Bertolucci (the subject of a 2013 documentary by Guadagnino and editor Walter Fasano).
This subtly envious dad recalls the confession of the pedophile father to his own son in Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998) — but unironically , so that the transgression partly set up by Elio’s enlightened parents is made complete and without guilt.
Call Me by Your Name is suffused with a cosmopolitan sense of attraction that makes it feel like a throwback to Thomas Mann’s seminal Death in Venice, about a writer who falls for a beautiful youth, and other stories of the kind—minus the tragedy.
I won’t spoil it entirely, but let’s just call it the art house version of the famous American Pie scene, only it involves a piece of fruit and is about ten times more provocative, emotional, and moving than Jason Biggs humping a pie.
Given his embarrassing indiscretions — fondling Oliver's used underwear and taking a virginal high schooler's practice run with a ripe peach, something out of "American Pie" — will he be rejected as a laughingstock?
The Italian director paces his film to perfection, while also lacing this love story with lashings of dramatic moments and laugh-out-loud humour (including a scene that rivals Jason Biggs' intimate pastry interaction in 1999's American Pie).
In Call Me by Your Name the idea of a young man’s developing sexuality (Elio’s in this case), along with the embarrassment and curiosity that accompanies it, isn’t treated with Hollywood’s typical ridicule (à la American Pie , Superbad ).
Throw in a curious, horny boy having sex with some of that overripe fruit and you’ve got notoriety, “American Pie” with less…baking.
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A playful, piano heavy soundtrack adds to the film’s sense of longing and discovery, with DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010) and editor Walter Fasano (who co-wrote the screenplay alongside Guadagnino and James Ivory) contributing to the film’s summertime sadness vibe, a lush, san-dappled tension which eventually becomes an accelerated throb of sensuality accompanied by the kind of overpowering desire which doubles for pain.
Rather, working with the gifted Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who shot Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Arabian Nights ), he’s refined his style into something poetic rather than bombastic.
As lighted by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who shot the recent “Arabian Nights” trilogy and, earlier, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” every second of “Call Me by Your Name” looks luscious as shot on 35 millimeter film.
The cinematographer, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom ( Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives , Arabian Nights ), films this confession in an elegantly choreographed long take in which the two men are separated by a monument in a public square, their faces visible to each other but not to us.
Rippling with nervously excited piano compositions and shot with immeasurable sensuality by Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” and “Arabian Nights”), “Call Me By Your Name” is a full-bodied film that submits all of its beauties to the service of one simple truth: The more we change, the more we become who we are.
The cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, known for creating slow, meditative cinematic moments with Apichatpong Weerasethakul in films such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Blissfully Yours, displays the same characteristic control over its visual and sensory subject matter.
The new feature film from I Am Love and A Bigger Splash filmmaker Luca Guadagnino chronicles a summer romance that blossoms between a young boy and a visitor in northern Italy, and by the film’s end it solidifies its place as one of the queer cinema greats alongside Carol, Brokeback Mountain, and Moonlight.
When considered within the tradition of onscreen gay courtship, the movie takes its immediate place alongside such all-time greats as Brokeback Mountain, Carol and the recent Moonlight.
In the end, though, it's Oliver that he can't get out of his head, but unlike Brokeback Mountain , in which its two male characters felt the pressure to suppress their romantic feelings for one another, Elio and Oliver do eventually consummate their love with ecstatic, exuberant giddiness.
I’d call it the next “Moonlight ” or “Brokeback Mountain,” but that would entirely belie its entrancing and — really, could it be?
It isn't Brokeback Mountain goes to Italy.
American cinema about gay men has generally fallen into several fairly hardened categories: personal struggle (Moonlight and Brokeback Mountain), the devastation of the AIDS crisis (Philadelphia, Angels in America), the battle for rights (The Normal Heart and Milk, which ends with real-life pioneer Harvey Milk’s assassination), over-the-top extravaganza (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!