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.
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.
If you ever wondered how a movie would look and sound as directed by Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash) and scripted by James Ivory (A Room With a View), the answer is this: precisely like nothing else.
James Ivory adapted the André Aciman book, and the combination of chilly repression and warming desire in Call Me by Your Name make it feel like an heir to Ivory’s A Room with a View.
Scripted by the great James Ivory (veteran director of classics like A Room With a View and Howard’s End), from a 2007 novel by Italian-American writer André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name follows the relationship between the 17-year-old son of a globe-trotting academic, and the 24-year-old American grad student hired as his father’s research assistant.
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.
In Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino partners with screenwriter James Ivory of Merchant Ivory fame (A Room With a View and The Remains of the Day), who adapts a novel by André Aciman that’s set in the 1980s in Northern Italy and details the lazy summer fling between the teenage boy Elio (Timothée Chalamet), on the cusp of manhood, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate student/research assistant helping Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg) work on an excavation of priceless and quite sensual artifacts.
Director Luca Guadagnino (2010's " I Am Love "), who is incapable of crafting an aesthetically ugly image, and writer James Ivory (1998's " A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries "), adapting from André Aciman's Lambda Literary Award-winning 2007 novel, have fashioned a coming-of-age tale of lived-in depth and astonishing sensuality.
Based on the novel by André Aciman, with a script written by the great James Ivory ( A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries ), director Luca Guadagnino’s ( I Am Love , A Bigger Splash ) ravishing, gorgeously cinematic Call Me by Your Name is a feast for the senses.
It wasn’t until 2014 that Guadagnino came back on board to help Oscar nominated writer James Ivory ( The Remains of the Day , Howards End ) with the screenplay and he was ultimately convinced to take on director duties as well.
André Aciman’s novel has been adapted by the venerable director James Ivory (“Howards End”) and it has an air of wistful but clear-minded looking back.
The script, adapted from the Andre’ Acimen novel, is written by three-time Academy Award nominated director James Ivory, who was so instrumental in the success of films like “The Remains of the Day” and “Howards End.” “Call Me by Your Name” actually plays like a Merchant/Ivory film – brilliantly performed and produced.
André Aciman’s novel has been adapted by James Ivory (best known as half of the Merchant-Ivory brain trust that created such exquisite period pieces as Howards End and The Remains of the Day), with Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash) serving as director.
(1) James Ivory (Maurice, The Remains of the Day, Howards End), who wrote the screenplay based on André Aciman's novel, is the laureate of agonizingly slow-burning love shared by inexpressive people in stately houses, (2) Guadagnino seems able to make the air around this family actually swoon with intellectual fecundity and erotic possibility, and (3) honestly, what is Armie Hammer doing there?
It’s a discreet version of pulling a schoolgirl’s pigtails, courtesy of the screenplay by James Ivory, director of the pompous literary adaptations A Room with a View , Maurice , and Howards End .
Directed by Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash) from a screenplay by James Ivory (The Remains Of the Day), Call Me By Your Name is nothing short of a cinematic seduction.
In Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino partners with screenwriter James Ivory of Merchant Ivory fame (A Room With a View and The Remains of the Day), who adapts a novel by André Aciman that’s set in the 1980s in Northern Italy and details the lazy summer fling between the teenage boy Elio (Timothée Chalamet), on the cusp of manhood, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate student/research assistant helping Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg) work on an excavation of priceless and quite sensual artifacts.
It wasn’t until 2014 that Guadagnino came back on board to help Oscar nominated writer James Ivory ( The Remains of the Day , Howards End ) with the screenplay and he was ultimately convinced to take on director duties as well.
The script, adapted from the Andre’ Acimen novel, is written by three-time Academy Award nominated director James Ivory, who was so instrumental in the success of films like “The Remains of the Day” and “Howards End.” “Call Me by Your Name” actually plays like a Merchant/Ivory film – brilliantly performed and produced.
André Aciman’s novel has been adapted by James Ivory (best known as half of the Merchant-Ivory brain trust that created such exquisite period pieces as Howards End and The Remains of the Day), with Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash) serving as director.
(1) James Ivory (Maurice, The Remains of the Day, Howards End), who wrote the screenplay based on André Aciman's novel, is the laureate of agonizingly slow-burning love shared by inexpressive people in stately houses, (2) Guadagnino seems able to make the air around this family actually swoon with intellectual fecundity and erotic possibility, and (3) honestly, what is Armie Hammer doing there?
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.)
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).
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.
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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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.
Director
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Critics compare Call Me by Your Name to 2 of Weerasethakul’s films.
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 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.
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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!
Luca Guadagnino has crafted a love story for the ages, a singularly breathtaking work of art that recalls the work of Bergman (Summer Interlude hangs heavy here), Bertolucci, and Visconti.