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Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
"It's a long story, so bear with me, Pro." Suddenly Oliver had become serious. "Many Latin words are derived from the Greek. In the case of 'apricot,' however, it's the other way around; the Greek takes over from Latin. The Latin word was praecoquum, from pre-coquere, pre-cook, to ripen early, as in 'precocious,' meaning premature.
"The Byzantines borrowed praecox, and it became prekokkia or berikokki, which is finally how the Arabs must have inherited it as al-birquq."
My mother, unable to resist his charm, reached out to him and tousled his hair and said, "Che muvi star!"
"He is right, there is no denying it," said my father under his breath, as though mimicking the part of a cowered Galileo forced to mutter the truth to himself.
"Courtesy of Philology 101," said Oliver.
All I kept thinking of was apricock precock, precock apricock.
One day I saw Oliver sharing the same ladder with the gardener, trying to learn all he could about Anchise's grafts, which explained why our apricots were larger, fleshier, juicier than most apricots in the region. He became fascinated with the grafts, especially when we discovered that the gardener could spend hours sharing everything he knew about them with anyone who cared to ask.
Call Me By Your Name by André AcimanRecited/Narrated by Armie Hammer
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on August 27, 2017, 02:09:29 pm ---
Oliver is the latest in a string of annual research assistants joining Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) at his family’s fabulous summer villa. Elio’s father is an archaeologist/art historian, and his French mother (Amira Casar) recites German poetry, translating it on the fly as the two men in her life cuddle up with her on the couch. For fun Elio transcribes classical piano scores, which he can also transpose to guitar. The Perlman family is one that can slip a reference to Heidegger into conversation and no one will bat an eye.
It’s a world where the broad-shouldered, blond Oliver fits in nicely. He savagely owns Professor Perlman with his mad etymology skills, breaking down the word “apricot” to its Latin, Greek and Arabic roots. His half-unbuttoned shirt reveals a Star of David necklace, which catches 17-year-old Elio by surprise. (Elio later explains that his mother considers the Perlmans “Jews of discretion” in the sleepy northern Italian vacation village.) At first Elio is annoyed by Oliver, but quickly becomes infatuated. How Oliver feels about Elio is more of a mystery, but as the days and nights continue (so many meals outside! And dancing to the Psychedelic Furs!) the invitations to “go for a swim” eventually turn intimate.
--- End quote ---
Aloysius J. Gleek:
It’s 1983, “somewhere in Northern Italy.” The height of summer, and all of the neighborhood teenagers are in heat. Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet, keeping the promise he showed in “Miss Stevens” last September) is still a virgin. A 17-year-old American whose father, a local celebrity, is an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture (Michael Stuhlbarg), Elio has sprouted from the soil like the apricot trees that surround his family’s villa, and he’s impatiently waiting to bloom. Scrawny enough to be mistaken for a child but sophisticated enough to be mistaken for a man, Elio is a multilingual music prodigy who’s more comfortable with Bach and Berlioz than he is in his own body. He knows everything and nothing. But he’s about to get one hell of an education. (....)
Guadagnino lives for the climactic portion of this story, when feelings are finally transmuted into action and Oliver’s true nature breaks through the marble bust of his body (Armie Hammer’s warmth in these scenes is extraordinary). The details are best experienced for yourself, but it’s safe to say that movie lives up to the book’s steamy reputation, and Chalamet and Hammer throw themselves at each other with the clumsy abandon of first love. Growingly increasingly divorced from its source material as it goes along, the final beats of Guadagnino’s adaptation galvanize two hours of simmering uncertainty into a gut-wrenchingly wistful portrait of two people trying to find themselves before it’s too late.
http://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/call-me-by-your-name-review-armie-hammer-luca-guadagnino-sundance-2017-1201772350/
Sundance 2017
Call Me by Your Name
Sundance 2017 Review
Luca Guadagnino Delivers A Queer Masterpiece
Hot on the heels of A Bigger Splash the filmmaker returns with a film that's worthy of comparisons to Carol and Moonlight
by David Ehrlich
@davidehrlich
Monday 23 January 2017 3:15 pm
‘He’s about to get one hell of an education’ ... Michael Stuhlbarg, Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name
“Is it better to speak or to die?” That’s the core question of “Call Me By Your Name,” which surfaces in a scene where a character reads the words of Marguerite of Navarre in “The Heptaméron,” but it’s an idea at the heart of all queer narratives. It’s been especially present in queer cinema, where muteness and survival are often the most bittersweet bedfellows. But “Call Me By Your Name” not only quotes Marguerite’s words, it suffuses them into every fiber of its being. It’s a great film because of how lucidly it poses her question, and an essential one because of how courageously it answers it.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino with all of his usual cool (“I Am Love”) and adapted from André Aciman’s beloved 2007 novel of the same name, the rapturous “Call Me By Your Name” nearly rates alongside recent LGBT phenomenons “Carol” and “Moonlight,” matching the artistry and empathy with which those new masterworks untangled the repressive desire of same-sex attraction.
It’s 1983, “somewhere in Northern Italy.” The height of summer, and all of the neighborhood teenagers are in heat. Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet, keeping the promise he showed in “Miss Stevens” last September) is still a virgin. A 17-year-old American whose father, a local celebrity, is an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture (Michael Stuhlbarg), Elio has sprouted from the soil like the apricot trees that surround his family’s villa, and he’s impatiently waiting to bloom. Scrawny enough to be mistaken for a child but sophisticated enough to be mistaken for a man, Elio is a multilingual music prodigy who’s more comfortable with Bach and Berlioz than he is in his own body. He knows everything and nothing. But he’s about to get one hell of an education.
Every summer, Elio’s father flies out a graduate student to stay at the villa and help him with his research — this year’s intern is Oliver (Armie Hammer, as sensational here as he was in “The Social Network,” but similarly a touch too old for the part). Oliver is 24 and his body is an epic unto itself, as big as any one of the ancient statues that have been dredged up from the local seas. Arrogant, eager, and almost suspiciously handsome for an aspiring historian, the mysterious new visitor often seems as though he got lost on his way to a Patricia Highsmith novel. While much of the film feels stretched between the feverish eros of Bertolucci, the budding warmth of Mia Hansen–Løve, and the affected stoicism of James Ivory (who, at 88, has a co-writing credit on this screenplay), a thin shadow of suspense creeps along the outer edges of each frame, priming viewers for a very different kind of pivot than the one Guadagnino deployed during the third act of “A Bigger Splash.”
Elio and Oliver grow closer as the summer sinks toward its dog days — at first they share only a bathroom, the skinny adolescent looking at his unpredictable new friend as though he can’t understand how they could be the same species, let alone be interested in the same thing. But commonalities and semi-secrets soon emerge: For one thing, they’re both Jews in a land of goys. Oliver, no doubt aware that he looks like the winner of Hitler’s master race, wears a Star of David necklace underneath his shirt, a barely visible emblem of his otherness. The Perlmans, on the other hand, are what Elio’s father describes as “Jews of discretion” (one of the funnier lines in a movie that’s laced with a sharp sense of humor), but the strangeness of celebrating Hanukkah within spitting distance of Vatican City eventually makes its mark.
As the film progresses, Elio and Oliver begin to share more tangible things: Bike rides, errant touches, an unknown desire to have sex with one another (that last one is a biggie). Crucially, however, Elio is as conflicted about his own passions as he is those of the boy next door. His tastes are molten and volatile — he performs the same piano piece in a wildly different style every time he plays it, much to Oliver’s amused frustration. When he’s not busy gawking at his brawny infatuation, he’s enthusiastically trying to deflower the French girl down the street (Esther Garrell, of the New Wave Garrells), who wears her wardrobe of summer dresses like she’s trying to shame away the other seasons.
Telling this story with the same characteristically intoxicating capriciousness that has come to define his work, Guadagnino doesn’t dwell on looks of questionably requited longing. He’s not Todd Haynes and — with the possible exception of a long take mid-movie that follows the two leads around a fountain and endows the space between them with a palpably physical sense of attraction and denial — he doesn’t try to be. Instead, he stays attuned to the raw energy of trying to feel someone out without touching them, of what it’s like to live through that one magical summer where the weather is the only part of your world that doesn’t change every day.
Rippling with nervously excited piano compositions and shot with immeasurable sensuality by Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” and “Arabian Nights”), “Call Me By Your Name” is a full-bodied film that submits all of its beauties to the service of one simple truth: The more we change, the more we become who we are. Like the Latin prefixes that Oliver and Mr. Perlman trace back to their roots or the antiquated artworks that resonate because of how much the world has changed since their creation, Elio learns that growth — however wild or worrisome it might seem at the time — is the greatest gift that he can give himself.
Watching him slowly come to that realization is an unforgettable and enormously moving experience because of how the film comes to realize it, too. Guadagnino lives for the climactic portion of this story, when feelings are finally transmuted into action and Oliver’s true nature breaks through the marble bust of his body (Hammer’s warmth in these scenes is extraordinary). The details are best experienced for yourself, but it’s safe to say that movie lives up to the book’s steamy reputation, and Chalamet and Hammer throw themselves at each other with the clumsy abandon of first love. Growingly increasingly divorced from its source material as it goes along, the final beats of Guadagnino’s adaptation galvanize two hours of simmering uncertainty into a gut-wrenchingly wistful portrait of two people trying to find themselves before it’s too late. As Elio’s father puts it in a heart-stopping monologue that every parent might want to memorize for future use: “Don’t make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything. What a waste.”
Leaving us with one of the gorgeous new songs that Sufjan Stevens wrote for the film, this achingly powerful story — a brilliant contribution to the queer cinema canon — breathes vibrant new life into the answer that Marguerite of Navarre gave to her own question. “I would counsel all such as are my friends to speak and not die,” she said, “for ’tis a bad speech that cannot be mended, but a life lost cannot be recalled.”
Grade: A
“Call Me By Your Name” premiered in the Premieres section of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics will release it later this year.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 21, 2017, 08:13:04 am ---
“Is it better to speak or to die?” That’s the core question of “Call Me By Your Name,” which surfaces in a scene where a character reads the words of Marguerite of Navarre in “The Heptaméron,” but it’s an idea at the heart of all queer narratives. It’s been especially present in queer cinema, where muteness and survival are often the most bittersweet bedfellows. But “Call Me By Your Name” not only quotes Marguerite’s words, it suffuses them into every fiber of its being. It’s a great film because of how lucidly it poses her question, and an essential one because of how courageously it answers it.
(....)
Leaving us with one of the gorgeous new songs that Sufjan Stevens wrote for the film, this achingly powerful story — a brilliant contribution to the queer cinema canon — breathes vibrant new life into the answer that Marguerite of Navarre gave to her own question. “I would counsel all such as are my friends to speak and not die,” she said, “for ’tis a bad speech that cannot be mended, but a life lost cannot be recalled.”
--- End quote ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_de_Navarre
Marguerite de Navarre
Her brother became King of France, as Francis I,
and the two siblings were responsible for the
celebrated intellectual and cultural court and
salons of their day in France.
She was the wife of Henry II of Navarre and
was the grandmother of Henry III of Navarre
who became Henry IV of France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptam%C3%A9ron
Heptaméron
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Heptaméron is a collection of 72 short stories written in French by Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549), published posthumously in 1558. It has the form of a frame narrative and was inspired by The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was originally intended to contain one hundred stories covering ten days just as The Decameron does, but at Marguerite’s death it was only completed as far as the second story of the eighth day. Many of the stories deal with love, lust, infidelity, and other romantic and sexual matters. One was based on the life of Marguerite de La Rocque, a French noblewoman who was punished by being abandoned with her lover on an island off Quebec.
The collection first appeared in print in 1558 under the title Histoires des amans fortunez edited by Pierre Boaistuau, who took considerable liberties with the original version, using only 67 of the stories, many in abbreviated form, and omitting much of the significant material between the stories. He also transposed stories and ignored their grouping into days as envisaged by the author. A second edition by Claude Gruget appeared only a year later in which the editor claimed to have “restored the order previously confused in the first impression”. Also the prologues and epilogues to each short story left out by Boaistuau were put back and the work was given, for the first time, the title Heptaméron (from the Greek ἑπτά – “seven” and ἡμέρα – “day”) due to the seven-day time frame into which the first 70 short stories are grouped.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on August 29, 2017, 09:02:20 pm ---
--- End quote ---
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 17, 2017, 10:25:37 am ---
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 11, 2017, 03:10:01 pm ---
The (partial) cast and crew of Call Me by Your Name
Front Row: Victoire Du Bois (Chiara) Esther Garrel (Marzia) Timothée Chalamet (Elio) André Aciman (Author--and Mounir)
Amira Casar (Annella) Luca Guadagnino (Director)
Center Back Row: Peter Spears (Isaac--and Producer) and, Far Right Back Row: Armie Hammer (Oliver)
Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
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9 February to 18 February 2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67th_Berlin_International_Film_Festival
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