Based upon the novel Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman
Screenplay Written by James Ivory
Directed by Luco Guadagnino
**** (four stars)
RATED R
In the summer of 1987, I was 18 years old.
It always amazes me when I have conversations with people of my age or older and they happen to remark that they possess no memories of their teenage years. This occurrence has happened so often that now, I am maybe wondering if I need to concede to the possibility that I may be an anomaly as for me, my adolescence is still so present. It never takes much ability for me to recall an episode, an event, a span of time and all of the emotions that pertain. I don't perceive myself to be living in the past as it is indeed a time I would never wish to return to. It is simply the fact that being closely in tune with all aspects of my life, especially the past, they will continue to serve their collective purpose of informing the present and possibly the future.
In the case of the summer of 1987, the 30 year time difference means nothing as I can instantly place myself back in the Chicago home I grew up in and the stretch of time between graduating from high school and leaving home to attend college in Madison, WI.
It was a time that felt to be interminable, filled with restlessness, loneliness, boredom, a certain anxiety and readiness to be out of my parents' house and (somewhat) on my own. It was a summer where I was essentially all on my own as the neighborhood friends I grew up with had all drifted apart and since I did not live near my school friends, and also aside from talking on the phone, I pretty much never saw them after graduation.
It was the summer where I began writing in earnest, dreaming away of being a filmmaker, sitting at the typewriter in my makeshift room in the basement, where I could screen my beloved John Hughes films whenever I wished and I obsessively listened to Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" (released October 12, 1979) and slowly found myself sinking deeper and deeper into Todd Rundgren's "Something/Anything?" (released February 1972), both albums I initially didn't care for but explored them every single day and night.
It was the summer where I tried to re-create my summer of 1986 obsession of riding my bike around and around the neighborhood but somehow, those elements never quite congealed in the same way again. Mostly, I pined away for unrequited crushes and romantic wounds, worrying myself to aching fits that not one person would ever love me. It was a summer of growing more introspective, definitely moodier, internally quieter, with ever present headphones at the ready for pure enjoyment or for an escape from whatever may have been troubling me at the time. I wanted to leave home but worried that I was unprepared then felt irritated with waiting even one day longer to leave and then feeling even more irritated that my parents had arranged for me to depart a week sooner than I had originally thought.
I can remember the summer breezes through the upstairs window. I can remember the color of the telephone I constantly used to talk to my friends (yellow). I can remember hoping that I could make some sense of myself for myself. I can remember it all.
The rush of memories I felt watching Director Luco Guadagnino's stunning, exquisite coming-of-age romantic drama "Call Me By Your Name" was nearly instantaneous as the internal conflicts contained within who you were, who you are and who you might become fully transcended the film's locale and primary love story, making for a film experience that was boundless in its sense of revelation. Guadagnino's film is as lush and languid as a warm, humid, long, lazy summer's day where possibilities seem endless and time itself feels to slow to a crawl if not stop altogether. And still, there is a powerful urgency to the film, one that contains clashing emotions and existential ideas and ideals about one's sexual awakening and therefore, one's emotional stability.
With all due respect to Greta Gerwig's "Lady Bird," that coming-of-age film does not even come close to approaching the heights and exceedingly aching emotional depths that are achieved in Luco Guadagnino's "Call Me By Your Name." This is a film so remarkably in tune to its sense of time and place that you can practically smell the season of the summer 1983 and all of the emotional and carnal waves displayed throughout. This is a film that delves clear past the bone and digs directly into the soul.
With its nearly dreamworld descriptive setting of "somewhere in Northern Italy," Luco Guadagnino's "Call Me By Your Name" takes place in the summer of 1983 as we meet 17 year old Jewish-American Elio (Timothee Chalamet), a bookworm and musical prodigy restlessly spending the season in the Italian countryside with his Mother (Amira Casar) and his Father (the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg), an archaeology professor.
As the film opens, the household is moments away from taking in a summer live-in guest, graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer), who is present to assist with the professor's academic paperwork yet whom the resentful Elio refers to as a "usurper." Where Elio is lanky and introspective, Oliver is gorgeously athletic, gregarious, confident and boisterous. While Elio quietly spends his days reading, transcribing music, swimming, riding his bike or hanging out with his girlfriend Marzia (Esther Garrel), he grows increasing irritated with Oliver's seemingly natural ability to traverse his new surroundings with ease, as well as his gift for quickly making friends, including the affections of Chiara (Victorie Du Bois).
It is as if Elio exists upon life's fringes while Oliver sits directly at the center yet on a day during which the volleyball playing Oliver touches the observant Elio upon his back, a spark is ignited leading to a lengthy, tentative courtship the two, ultimately building into a full romantic affair.
Luco Guadagnino's "Call Me By Your Name" is exemplary. Instantly transportive and unquestionably seductive, the film effortlessly weaves a spell that will undoubtedly inspire travel (both physical and spiritual) as well as potentially unearth levels of deeply internalized desire(s) that may prove to be as revealing and as painful as they are for the characters within the film.
While the main romance within the film is indeed a homosexual one, I do not think that Guadagnino has necessarily created a "coming out coming-of-age" film, so to speak. But even so, he is exploring large yet meticulously intimate themes of sexuality from repression, confusion, exuberance, concealment, acceptance, self-denial and anxiety, which then digs further into the emotional, the romantic, and the existential. What is the truth of myself and what does it mean to deny myself the ability to be my truest self? Would it be better to voice my deepest desires to bring them to life or should I conform, and just let it wither away into the ether?
In pursuit of those particular questions and answers, Guadagnino allows "Call Me By Your Name" to meander for a large amount of its running time...just like an endless summer day. This is a film that is not in a hurry to arrive at any pre-conceived destination and this approach allowed the characters, as well as all of us in the audience, to swim within the moments and therefore, the memories...including the very memories just created moments ago. In fact, that is what the film overall feels like: a collection of moments that by film's end, all snap together like the most complex jigsaw puzzle. And when it comes to sex, desire, romance and self-discovery it is through reaching the conclusion, where one can reflect and only then easily see how those specific moments were the distinctive moments that led to the romance in the first place...like breadcrumbs laid down to be re-discovered to find a newfound sense of home.
I guess there is a sense of nostalgia as the film is set in 1983 but for a period piece, "Call Me By Your Name" is rapturously timeless and aside from Elio's Talking Heads T-shirt and a few other period piece nuggets, Luco Guadagnino is not at all interested in creating an ode to pop culture. In fact, I am wondering if Guadagnino is making a commentary about the 21st century as the film is so refreshingly analog in its presentation.
In the Northern Italian countryside world of "Call Me By Your Name," there are no computers, therefore, no smartphones or social media. Television is rarely viewed. And frankly, there are not even that many cars! Guadagnino gives us a world of walking, biking, swimming in clear, succulent water, books, fruit and juice straight from the orchards, the air flowing through the leaves, pianos and timeless classical music, tape recorders, sheet music and pens, radios with antennas and that unmistakable sound of airwave static...I think you can capture the picture. If you lived through that era as I have, the film nearly makes me wish to return to an era that was so technologically uncomplicated, invasive, pervasive and prevalent. If you haven't lived through that era, then Guadagnino invites you to take a luxurious gaze into a period without our current advances and/or distractions. For all of us, we can easily inhale the scent of freshness and time that emanates from the screen in its warm summer breezes.
"Call Me By Your Name" is a film of connections formed through symbols and definitely language, as the characters float easily from English to Italian to French and both the Professor and Oliver are language historians. That said, Guadagnino has created a work that is actually not propelled through its dialogue necessarily, as connections are formulated via means that are at times suggestive physically or even almost ephemeral.
For instance, Elio's observance of Oliver's Star Of David necklace provides a sense of connective tissue between himself and the so -called usurper through their Jewish heritage. Even further, a trip to an archaeological dig site provides (and even begins to create) connective tissue between Oliver, Elio and the Professor. Mostly, observe the body language on display in the film. We can see how body language represents the differences between American and Italian culture. Watch how Oliver eats and drinks ravenously where his companions are deliberately slower, experiencing every single bite and drink. Additionally, dancing to The Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way" in a nightclub proves itself to be a seductive act and a jovial touch from Oliver to Elio's back during a volleyball game is indeed the spark that begins to produce the flame. Where Marzia's deeper understanding of Elio and Oliver arrives through what has been unspoken, the depths of Elio and Oliver's relationship arrives through acts both spoken (hence the film's title) and the unspoken.
And really, just watch Elio's body language throughout the film, as his adolescent herky-jerky, sudden, sharp movements work in full contrast not only to Oliver's fully adult confidence but to the luscious yet torpid pace of the summer season itself--it is as if he is trying to physically will something...anything (ha ha) into existence. Yet by the film's shattering final image, Elio is essentially paralyzed, and in a remarkable piece of acting, Timothee Chalamet wordlessly allows us to achingly explore a world of emotions solely through his face in a lengthy unbroken shot.
As I write to you, the Oscar nominations for this year's 90th annual Academy Awards have been announced and I am beyond thrilled that "Call Me By Your Name" has been acknowledged within four categories of Best Actor for Timothee Chalamet, Best Adapted Screenplay for James Ivory, Best Director for Luco Gadagnino and Best Original Song for one of Sufjan Stevens' three quietly shattering pieces featured in the film. They are all exceedingly well deserved. What stuns me is the omission of Armie Hammer, whose undeniably magnetic performance is his best to date and also, unquestionably crucial to the success of the film as a whole, especially as his role works as a duet with Chalamet's.
Armed with a charisma that I have not seen since perhaps the first time I saw Jude Law, which was in Director Anthony Minghella's Italian set and homosexual themed psychological thriller "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999), the sheer watch-ability and complexities contained within his performance of Oliver are formidable. He is the brash American, the Adonis figure and even more things inscrutable and captivating. Certainly, and especially within the context of our #MeToo and #Timesup movement, we could examine, or even argue, about the intents and purposes of the perhaps 25 year old Oliver towards the 17 year old Elio. For me, as I watched the film, I felt a certain purity to the relationship as well as the simultaneous lifts of passion, euphoria, confusion of messages sent, received and misconstrued and definitely, the bittersweetness contained in the fact that the summer of 1983, like all summers, cannot last forever. There will be a conclusion but how difficult will it be and for what reasons, are all unknown until they occur. Armie Hammer is magnificent and there is just not one conceivable reason I can think of that he was not nominated.
To that end, the omission of nominating veteran character actor Michael Sthulbarg as Elio's Father in the Best Supporting Actor category is unfathomable. In many ways, the entire film snaps together powerfully near the very end of the film as he delivers a heartbreaking, gorgeous, absolutely beautifully delivered emotional bombshell of a monologue to Elio, brings ALL of the emotional, psychological and romantic terrain of "Call Me By Your Name" into sharp clarity.
As a cinematic rarity, it is a scene between a Father and son presented without comedy, irony, false or guarded sensitivity. It is a monologue of tenderness and anguish presented with a painful quietness in its love, desperation and confession, the likes of which I have not seen since Brian Cox's shattering Father/son monologue delivered at the conclusion of Spike Lee's "25th Hour" (2002). A gain, we regard what is spoken and unspoken and through Stuhlbarg's performance, we gain greater insight into the inner worlds of Elio, Oliver and himself, making an already revelatory film become even more revealing, as it illustrates just how very little we, as teenagers, ever really know about our parents, and their dreams, desires and sacrifices. Michael Stuhlbarg truly delivered one of the very best performances I saw in 2017 in just mere minutes and it makes me sad that he was not recognized for Oscar.
Regardless of award nominations, Luco Guadagnino's "Call Me By Your Name" is essential, sublime viewing. Now that word has already been announced that Guadagnino wishes to tackle the lives of Elio and Oliver over the course of potentially five films in total, much like Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise" (1995), "Before Sunset" (2004), and "Before Midnight" (2013), I am more than ready to witness how the twosome grow and change over time, whether together or apart or some state in between as this cinematic world more than lends itself to the exploration and immersion. But first, "Call Me By Your Name" is a lyrical, poetic ode to summers and ages long gone yet so ever present and for those of you who claim to not remember those times in your own lives, I firmly believe that a re-awakening will occur as you regard this extraordinary film.
Luco Guadagnino's "Call Me By Your Name" is one of 2017's highest achievements.
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