Call me By Your Name

Pure Romance, Just In Time

Originally Printed in Compass, December 20, 2017.

In his masterful film, "Call Me By Your Name," Italian director Luca Guadagnino plays with time like a silver dollar in an illusionist’s hand as it vanishes and reappears. Through skill and visual sleight-of-hand he shows you something unalterable, alters it, and to complete the bittersweet magic trick as your attention is diverted, returns it as he first promised it would be. The promise he makes is to tell you a story in 1983 as Oliver, a 24-year-old American graduate student (Armie Hammer), arrives to study with a family of academics on the Italian Riviera for one brief summer. Yet the secluded seaside town exists in a limbo of stillness, where old men play cards in cobblestone squares washed in midday light with hardly a car in sight. The family home, even further removed from any decade, dwells in a painted world of impressionist landscapes, the yellow grass and the green hills in the wind, the translucent aqua of the ocean waves and a sky so clear and hot it’s near white. 

Another wet bathing suit hung on the bathtub, another glass of fresh juice sweating with condensation, another familiar splash from the fountain… the days are slow yet speeding along. The professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his wife (Amira Casar) host new intellectuals nightly, whipping up dinner debates on literature and language in interchangeable English, French and Italian. Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory (of Merchant Ivory Productions) craft a world so charming you get lost in its comfort. Scenes of days bleed into new days that turn into nights that last for days until you are under the spell of an endless summer.

Yet for Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the professor’s classically educated, precocious  17-year-old son whose perspective we share, every languid moment pulses with a new emotion, even as he does his best to appear utterly indifferent. Spying from his bedroom window as Oliver arrives he makes a show of sneering at his family’s guest, a sculpted Adonis of impossible handsomeness and height, golden skin and golden hair, with the masculine jawline of a matinee idol. Elio, pale and delicate, dutifully offers to show the American around. Playing cool with performative scoffs, he soon recoils, hurt at how readily Oliver, seemingly only politely amused by their conversation, departs to explore on his own. “Later,” Oliver waves, always shrugging off goodbyes.

So begins their dance around the house, flirtation as a mystery game: crossed signals and missed clues, every glance and touch and breath a coded advance or hasty retreat. Elio fixates on Oliver, watching moments that will soon be memories, lost in internal conflict yet searching for connection. Oliver, reading shirtless in the sun, is an unreadable figure, while Elio’s long lashes and thin limb movements can’t help but telegraph to us his every secret thought. In stolen minutes alone his body lunges into new and private impulses, physically pulled by a gravity he can’t yet emotionally grasp. How do you say “I need you” when you have no reference for what you feel? No insight as to what the consequence may be? Elio’s bravery is spurred as time is running out.

Their first kiss is as purely romantic and deeply sexual as the best that real life has to offer any of us. Hammer and Chamalet burn up the screen with a rare connection that effortlessly explores just how closely intimacy, fear, arousal, shame and longing really entwine. It is within seconds that excitement can become a tightness caught in your throat, holding back tears you can’t explain. Elio’s thin fingers grasp at Oliver’s muscled arms for comfort in the shadows of August’s afternoon. To be loved fully, in every way, for all that you are, is an overwhelming offer, and one “Call Me By Your Name” is sure to let us know not everyone receives. For however long they hold it, that kind of love belongs to the lucky.

Reader, if I could offer you one film gift this Christmas, it would be this: that the theater you attend is not hasty with turning on the lights. Guadagnino’s last bit of magic, an unforgettable final shot, lasts through the credits to the film’s true final seconds. You deserve the pleasure, and the privacy, of watching it in the dark. It is a beautiful journey through a terrible truth: There is some heartbreak that never heals. We grow older, we find a smile, and time goes on.