The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
John, you probably saw the New York review calling it a masterpiece? I'll have to say the description of the plot alone would not necessarily make me see it (but then, neither did BBM, and I had even read, and liked, the short story!!). I'm looking forward to it.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on November 24, 2017, 06:23:57 pm ---Thank you, friend John. Won't be long now! I'm looking forward to the cameo by the peach!
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Thanks Lee! I'm so sorry that you still have to wait for the Denver release, but--time does seem to be flying anyway, isn't it? Thankfully!
--- Quote from: serious crayons on November 26, 2017, 12:03:33 am ---John, you probably saw the New York review calling it a masterpiece? I'll have to say the description of the plot alone would not necessarily make me see it (but then, neither did BBM, and I had even read, and liked, the short story!!). I'm looking forward to it.
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Hey, Katherine! I've seen the movie twice now, and I like it a lot (well, obviously-- ::) :laugh: ) but my personal thumbs-up recommendation is, at least, sincere. ( :laugh: :laugh: )
NYMag's David Edelstein is not my favorite film critic--he can be, quite often, a bit sloppy (or is it just that he isn't all that smart ?) as with this quote (and see the full review below): "Michael Stuhlbarg plays Elio’s father, an anthropology professor--." Er, NO. Archaeologist maybe, but definitely someone who works with old Greco-Roman sculpture and is clearly involved with the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, and history, i.e., the Classics. His (kind-of, 6 weeks duration) graduate student/doctoral candidate/amanuensis (Oliver/Armie) is writing his own (Oliver's) dissertation and/or book about HERACLITUS, fer chrissakes. But that's Edelstein: "Michael Stuhlbarg plays Elio’s father, an anthropology professor--." Argh!! Sloppy or dumb (at least in this instance).
HOWEVER, my own Anthropologist/Archaeologist bugaboo-bugbear aside, the Edelstein review isn't altogether bad (although I've certainly read much better ones). There are a lot of points he could have mentioned, but he did not. I will mention a few: Luca Guadagnino's movie is not only FUNNY, it is as WRY as it is KIND. it is insanely INTELLIGENT without ever (or, ok, almost never) showing off, NEVER self-admiring nor self-satisfied. It is SMOKING HOT, yet at the same time not as EXPLICIT as one might have expected, considering, yes, fellatio and masturbation with the aforementioned peach. Most of all: it is hugely emotional without being at all maudlin or (in the worst way) cheaply sentimental--it is NEVER cheap. It is DISCREET, even TASTEFUL, and I am not damning it with faint praise, far from it. The opposite of COY, it is HONEST. Nothing is ever TELEGRAPHED, but absolutely nothing is hidden. The movie is visually gorgeous. The music score is beautiful. (We are shown Timmy/Elio's musicianship in short snippets, and it is shown to be lovely, often intense but in a way that is graceful and nonchalant--we, the audience, are as proud, often amazed, and sometimes a little bit as worried, as his parents are--quietly. Quietly worried, quietly amazed, quietly proud. There is NEVER any fuss (or very little), NEVER any insistence of overt 'specialness' or genius. Elio is just Elio.)
The CAST is amazing. (The cliche that there are no small parts is certainly true here.) Elio's mother (Amira Casar), in a smaller role, IS AMAZING. A different--and better!--review noted that Elio's mother has the same facial expression, the same hooded eyes as her son when either of them (separately), with an appraising glance, looks at--well, at Oliver, of course. And I went: woah! Elio's friend/then girlfriend/then friend again, Marzia, is very good, and, momentarily, heartbreaking when Elio, momentarily, is a little shit. The housekeeper, the gardener, the old woman who gives the boys glasses of water on a hot day, are all so good, which is to say, natural. (Elio's girlfriend and hard-working housekeeper are so different but are so alike in a sense, because they both inhabit the same universe, they are so REAL, so IMMEDIATE. Mafalda, the housekeeper, only speaks Italian--dialect?--and Marzia, the girlfriend mostly speaks French and Italian with only one short phrase, heartbreakingly, in English to Elio: "Am I not your girl?" when Oliver has his heart. All of this foreign dialogue is subtitled only when needed, but it is not distancing at all, it is natural and seamless.) My biggest complaint? At 2 hours and 10 minutes, it is way too SHORT. The last part of André Aciman's book (the two boys' last trip to Rome) was literally unfilmable because of the tiny budget. Yet, at $3.5 million, I cannot conceive how they managed to do as well as they did.
So--is it a masterpiece? Is it Perfect? Well, no, probably not. Me with yet another bugaboo-bugbear: Does (clearly super-intelligent) Oliver REALLY ask (in 1983!) about a war memorial statue--"Is that from WWII?" when the bronze soldier is wearing puttees and a WWI flat soup dish on his head? Mortifying! But Oliver didn't (creepily) feed the dopey line to Elio to allow Elio feel smart, the momentarily dopey SCRIPT made Oliver feed Elio that stupid line. (Maybe for the 2017 audience this isn't an issue? Aren't WWI & WWII in the Middle Ages anyway? What's the diff!) But the stupid line made me cringe because Oliver IS smart and he wasn't trying to butter up Elio. And again, for me the removal of the book's Rome episode from the script rankles. For a fan of Aciman's book, replacing the Dantean weekend in Rome with a (literal) bus-and backpack holiday to Bergamo and bucolic environs is disappointing. But, in these degenerate, tawdry Trumpian times, compared to what else you'll see in the multiplex--yes. Yes, it is a masterpiece. And when the two boys with backpacks were climbing towards the pretty falls and were shouting their names at each other in glee, I shed tears. :)
The three principals, Armie Hammer/Oliver, Timmy Chalamet/Elio and Michael Stuhlbarg/Prof. Perlman, are brilliant, in at least three different ways, but Timmy/Elio is far and above the most brilliant. He is the movie, all the way through, but two phone calls towards the end are tear-making. The first: after Oliver has finally gone, Elio, suddenly unable to make his own way home, calls his mother from the train station a considerable distance away, and asks her to pick him up with the family car. The fact that he is looking away from the camera is kindness itself because the audible catch in his throat is heartrending. Then, the second: months later, it is hanukkah, a gentle, serenely snowy day, and a seemingly now happy, cheerful Elio picks up a ringing telephone, saying "I'll get it!" to his parents. It is Oliver, supposedly calling to wish the Perlmans happy hanukkah, but really to tell Elio that he, Oliver, is getting married in the spring. "Do you mind?" says Oliver. The conversation (only SEEN by Elio's end, in the hallway of the Perlman home) is devastating. Now think: when this scene was filmed, actor Timmy Chalamet was 19 years old. Unbelievable.
Sorry, I'm all scattered--but here are two photos of the cast not usually shown:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/mediaviewer/rm1764710400
Luncheon under the trees: Mrs Perlman, Professor Perlman, Oliver and ElioAmira Casar, Michael Stuhlbarg, Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/mediaviewer/rm3976289024
Mafalda, Marzia and Elio in the kitchen.
Vanda Capriolo, Esther Garrel and Timothée Chalamet
Anyway, here's the Edelstein NYMag: review:
http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/review-call-me-by-your-name-is-a-masterpiece.html
Call Me by Your Name
Is a Masterpiece
By David Edelstein
November 22, 2017 8:01 pm
Young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name
In Call Me by Your Name, the gifted young American actor Timothée Chalamet plays Elio, a 17-year-old who spends summers with his academic parents in their airy, rustic villa in Crema in northern Italy. In early scenes, the skinny, long-waisted Elio seems vaguely uncomfortable in his body, as if uncertain what to do with it apart from the de rigeur canoodling with teenage girls who swim with him in nearby lakes and ponds. It’s only when he stares from his bedroom window at the arrival of this year’s summer guest — a young scholar who’ll spend six weeks reading, writing, and working with the professor — that Elio seems to come out of his own head.
The 24-year-old visitor, Oliver (Armie Hammer), has an easy, almost arrogant physicality. He’s broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, absurdly handsome. But he’s hard to read. Oliver gives the shirtless Elio a quick shoulder massage and then heads off to play volleyball. Was it innocent or a come-on? Whichever, Oliver’s touch lingers. Elio sneaks into Oliver’s room and sticks his nose into a pair of discarded bathing trunks, inhaling sharply. He puts them on his head. He’s in heaven.
Call Me by Your Name takes place in summer, 1983. It has the feel of something recollected in tranquility, but the eroticism is startlingly immediate. The faithful adaptation of André Aciman’s novel is by James Ivory, but the movie has a different feel than Ivory’s own formal, somewhat stiff work. The Italian director Luca Guadagnino creates a mood of free-floating sexual longing. Oliver never wears long pants, only short shorts or swim trunks, and young men are always doffing their shirts and jumping into sparkling water or riding on bicycles along dirt roads. The flesh tones stand out against the villa’s pale whites and yellow walls — more tactile but on a continuum with the sculptures and oil paintings by men with similar longings centuries ago. Call Me by Your Name is hardly the first film set in Italy to juxtapose youth and beauty and fleeting seasons with ancient buildings and ruins. But I can’t recall such a continuum between the ephemeral and the enduring.
I also can’t remember a filmmaker who has captured the essence of midsummer this way, lazy but so vivid that every sound registers. Sound floats in through windows — of insects and birds but mostly wind. The presence of Nature can be felt in every one of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s frames. It’s reflected in the bodies of the characters. Oliver is hard for Elio — and us — to read. Is he toying with the teenager? Or is something stirring in him, too? In this atmosphere, how can something not be stirring? There’s friction in the uncertainty, heightened when Oliver dances provocatively with Elio’s kinda-sorta girlfriend. The minutes go by and then we’re into the film’s second hour with everything maddeningly —but thrillingly — undefined.
The love scenes between Elio and Oliver aren’t explicit — they only feel as if they are. The title is said in a moment of passion. It’s Oliver’s fervent desire to dissolve his self, to become one with Elio. I should point out that Armie Hammer doesn’t look 24 — more like 29, which he was during filming, and that changes the dynamic. Make of that what you will (17 was above the age of legal consent in Italy), but it’s Elio who finally pushes Oliver over the brink — who calls the question.
Michael Stuhlbarg plays Elio’s father, an anthropology professor who gazes intently at his son, seems to know what’s happening — and doesn’t interfere. He and Elio have a revelatory conversation near the end, but it’s the very last shot that stays in mind, all but dissolving the boundary between viewer and actor. Everything in Call Me by Your Name registers momentously, from the scene that definitively raises the question, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” to the ’80s dance numbers to the yearning Sufjan Stevens song over the stunning credits. Chalamet gives the performance of the year. By any name, this is a masterpiece.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 26, 2017, 02:42:06 am ---NYMag's David Edelstein is not my favorite film critic--he can be, quite often, a bit sloppy (or is it just that he isn't all that smart ?)
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He's not mine, either. I don't know if you pay attention to TV reviews, but their TV critics are far superior. Matt Zoller Seitz, their lead TV critic, is also a good film critic who maintains Roger Ebert's website. Their next-in-line reviewers are good, also.
For film, I've always prefer Slate. But Dana Stevens, the regular film critic, is no longer reviewing many films for some reason, so most of their reviews have been written by assorted people.
Then there's The New Yorker, and while Anthony Lane is an intelligent and amusing writer I sometimes think he tries too hard for jokes at the expense of actually analyzing the movies. And he's far pickier than I would be.
So I guess that leaves the New York Times, which is usually pretty good, IMO.
Meryl:
John, I must say that your review is spot on and far superior to Edelstein's. Thanks so much for sharing it here! :-*
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Meryl on November 27, 2017, 01:42:16 am ---John, I must say that your review is spot on and far superior to Edelstein's.
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Agreed! :D
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