Review: Call Me By Your Name
Summer 1983, somewhere in Northern Italy. There is a boy, Elio (Timothée Chalamet), 17 years old, deriding the arrival of the latest interloper to his family's villa. The usurper in question is Oliver (Armie Hammer), seven years older, American, prone to punctuating his sentences with an offhand "Later!" Oliver has come to stay for six weeks to serve as a research assistant to Elio's father, Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), an expert in classical archaeology. To say that Oliver disturbs the paradisiacal peace is an understatement.
His presence seems innocuous enough at first, though there are minor chords of suspense in the way Elio regards Oliver with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, superiority, resentment, and a somewhat reluctant admiration. Indeed, Oliver is designed to be admired - intelligent enough to debate the etymology of the word "apricot" with the Professor as well as being so remarkable a physical specimen that he resembles a Roman statue come to life. Where Elio is bookish and introspective - he spends his days reading, transcribing music, swimming, and lazing about with his sort-of girlfriend Marzia (Esther Garrel) - Oliver is swaggering and carefree, as comfortable playing cards with the old locals as he is dancing without inhibition with Elio's set of friends. An unshakeable frisson begins to stir within Elio, who is soon submerged in desire and longing for Oliver.
Call Me By Your Name is adapted from the 2007 novel by André Aciman by James Ivory, the American director best known for A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day, films in which the sensual simmered beneath the facade of societal propriety. Yet this film is directed by Luca Guadagnino who, with his previous works I am Love and A Bigger Splash, has proven that he has no time for such percolations. Guadagnino revels in the sensuous and erotic - carnality fills every frame of his films - and Call Me By Your Name is a feast for the senses. There is a purpose in the way Guadagnino lavishes so much attention on the way the sunlight sheens on Elio and Oliver's skin, the startlingly precise images, and the Proustian obsessiveness to detail - when in the rapture of love, but particularly first and also forbidden love, everything is ripe for the remembering.
Chalamet and Hammer perform an exquisite pas de deux of hesitancy and submission as the characters navigate through the thorny thicket of love. They approach and avoid - a touch on the shoulder here, the joy of a first kiss, the closing of a door to signal refusal or separation, a hand firmly between the legs, "Just don't" as a gentle reproach, then the stirring declaration: "Call me by your name, and I'll call you by mine." Their inevitable parting is perfectly rendered: devoid of dialogue but with a sense that this is how it was meant to be.
Though Elio and Oliver rightly take centre stage for the majority of the film, it is Professor Perlman who unexpectedly delivers the film's most poignant charge in its waning moments. "We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of 20 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything...what a waste." Stuhlbarg should be wreathed in laurels for that scene alone for so movingly conveying the Professor's personal understanding, tacit approval, and fatherly consolation. Be yourself and don't settle for less - words to share and words to live by.
Call Me By Your Name
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Written by: James Ivory; based on the novel by André Aciman
Starring: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel
