Call Me by Your Name

Director Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash) returns to the sun-soaked Italian coastal countryside for this visually stunning and sensual adaptation of André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name. Set in 1983, the story is a personal account of 17-year-old Italo-American Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and the life-changing summer he spends with Oliver (Armie Hammer), the gorgeous American doctoral student his antiquities professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) hires as a research assistant.

While ostensibly a gay coming-of-age narrative set in a not too distant past, Call Me by Your Name does not attempt to convey the particulars of gay awakening in a certain era.  Rather, it utilizes the specifics of its narrative and setting to evoke near-universal experiences of first courtship, first sex, first love, and first romantic loss. The gender of the two lovers, as well as their age difference, the time period, and the details of the location dictate the slow, pensive development of their friendship, attraction, flirtation, agreement, and sexual consummation. The film is a long, slow dance where we observe how the characters grapple with complex feelings and navigate the best ways to act on them.  Anyone who might feel unsettled by the seven-year age difference between these lovers might want to consider how they go about their delicate progression towards intimacy rather than the mere fact that they become intimate.  In our contemporary culture where so many seem baffled as to how to have affirmative consent without turning sex into some cold, businesslike transaction, Call Me by Your Name provides an erotic textbook example.

At the center of this quiet, patient picture is Chalamet’s wonderful performance—easily the best of the year. Unlike the showy, bombastic roles that normally grab our attention, or the transformations into prestigious or notorious real-life characters which usually win awards, what makes Chalamet’s work so impressive is not the ways in which Elio is an exceptional young man—his precocious knowledge of art and culture, his ability to play many musical instruments, his articulate command of multiple languages—but rather it’s what makes Elio ordinary that Chalamet conveys so beautifully. His journey from overconfident teen to self-possessed young man is so subtle we only fully recognize it during the powerful final shot, and then, more reflectively, when thinking back on the film. While the idealized setting and other elements of nostalgic daydream pervade this picture, Chalamet’s subtle and organic honesty grounds the movie in emotions we have all felt at key moments in our lives. The opportunity to relive those precious feelings is one of cinema’s most unique and powerful gifts. 

The novel is written from the perspective of an older Elio, as a reminiscence of times gone by in which he and Oliver meet at a few different points in their lives. The film abridges the source material and transforms the story into a brief encounter. Like most movies that fall into that classification—my favorite sub-genre of cinema—it’s bittersweet, and it lingers with the viewer long after the last end title rolls by. Guadagnino, his cast, and other collaborators, were so enamored of this filmmaking experience that they’ve expressed a desire to do a sequel. I have no idea if the proposed follow up would adhere to the events of the novel or go off in original directions. Perhaps the filmmakers intend to revisit Elio and Oliver at different stages of life, like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise movies. Thus, like Before Sunrise, a great Brief Encounter Picture would be transformed into something altogether different—a recurring opportunity to check-in with fictional characters as they move through life in real time alongside us. But until that time, we can savor this stand-alone work as an evocation of the lamentable impermanence of first passion and the transcendent immutability of first love.