The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://matholcroft.tumblr.com/post/166214683059
http://matholcroft.tumblr.com/
http://monetsberm.tumblr.com/post/166216041096
http://monetsberm.tumblr.com/
Aloysius J. Gleek:
'You do know that you live in a state
where the age of consent is 16, right….?
Ok. Now shut up.'
('And thank you for your service to our country')
https://twitter.com/armiehammer?lang=en
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4961620/Armie-Hammer-defends-relationship-Call-Name.html
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Armey Hammer gamely plays along and gives the perfect supporting performance. He knows the film isn’t his, and mirroring Oliver’s attitude toward Elio, the actor stands back, letting Timothée Chalamet find his rhythm. The young actor gives an emotionally raw performance, easily acting as the audience surrogate. It is a performance that improves as the film goes on, and during the final devastating shot, as Sufjan Stevens plays, it feels as if he has come of age alongside Elio.
http://culturefly.co.uk/call-me-by-your-name-bfi-london-film-festival-review/
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW
Call Me by Your Name
★★★★★
by HENRY BEVAN
OCTOBER 8, 2017
As Sufjan Stevens plays, Timothée Chalamet gives an emotionally raw performance in Call Me by Your Name
“Is it better to speak or to die?” asks Armie Hammer’s Oliver, the 24-year-old summer intern for Michael Stuhlbarg’s Professor Perlman. Oliver is quoting an old tale, but the meaning is clear: he is referring to his burgeoning relationship with Elio (Timothée Chalamet), Professor Perlman’s 17-year-old son. Both characters are conflicted about their feelings, confused at what they mean and what they could do. Call Me By Your Name is about love and loss, of living in the moment and understanding some things cannot be understood. It is a transformative film, one that’ll make you remember the last time you entwined fingers with someone you love.
Based on André Aciman’s novel, brilliantly adapted by James Ivory who distills the internal monologue into visual sequences, Call Me By Your Name is unlike any other romance movie. Through vague title cards (“Somewhere in Northern Italy”) and intricate sound design, director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash) makes this romance decidedly universal. While some will be disappointed by the lack of onscreen homosexual sex, the camera panning towards an open window accompanied by squelches and slurps is suggestive in a way showing the act wouldn’t be. It’s an inviting movie designed to appeal to anyone who has unexpected all-consuming love, and the director strives for maintaining intimacy and universality.
He only admits to the film’s setting because he wants an excuse to clothe his cast in the bare minimum. Their topless torsos revealing how vulnerable the characters feel about their new love. By stripping away any assumptions the audience can make about the characters, Guadagnino lets us imprint ourselves on the situation, with only Oliver’s enviable shirts and his Star of David necklace suggesting a life outside of this bottled romance.
Their relationship has a physical start and end date, marked, as these things are, by public transportation. Oliver arrives suddenly by taxi and departs by train, the trailing carriages symbolising that even though their time together is over, their love remains. A slower film than A Bigger Splash, Guadagnino lets us absorb the images with a series of long takes, soaking us with this romance.
During one scene the characters examine and fawn over an ancient statue, admiring its dimensions. It’s a moment of self-awareness as Hammer has a body the Ancient Greeks and Romans would be proud to flaunt. The camera objectifies him because he is Elio’s object of affection. It never becomes pornographic, as Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography is sensual and loving, caressing everything from the actors to the buildings to the fruit.
Hammer gamely plays along and gives the perfect supporting performance. He knows the film isn’t his, and mirroring Oliver’s attitude toward Elio, the actor stands back, letting Chalamet find his rhythm. The young actor gives an emotionally raw performance, easily acting as the audience surrogate. It is a performance that improves as the film goes on, and during the final devastating shot, as Sufjan Stevens plays, it feels as if he has come of age alongside Elio.
Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar play the supporting but concerned parents well, and Esther Garrel captures the complex emotions love can cause as she offers Elio an olive branch. For some, Call Me By Your Name may be too slow, but it’s like watching a candle burn. As the flame slowly dances down the wick and the wax melts, you feel yourself being ensnared. Once the flame reaches the end, you feel transformed.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Luca Guadagnino’s telling of the development of this romance, which changes both Elio and Oliver, is like the feeling of getting gently drunk. It’s smooth but a little dizzying. He fills every scene with life. Trees are heavy with fruit; people are always eating; the chirping of crickets a constant soundtrack. He thrusts life at you and wills his characters to live theirs. Long summer days drift away in a gentle routine of swimming, cycling and nothing, but each day that passes with feelings unvoiced is a day lost — they will never have it back.
https://www.empireonline.com/movies/call-name/review/
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW
Call Me by Your Name
★★★★★
by Olly Richards
9 Oct 2017 09:36
In Call Me by Your Name Timothée Chalamet plays Elio as a person still forming, not scared by his feelings but surprised. In a film in which
every performance is terrific, Chalamet makes the rest look like they’re acting.
It’s the early 1980s. Elio is living an idyllic existence in Italy with his parents. One summer, his charmed life is disturbed by Oliver, who comes to spend six weeks with the family, helping Elio’s father. They are six weeks that will change Elio’s life forever.
In his last film, A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino stuck four attractive people in a remote holiday home and set off a sort of lustful Hunger Games, where sex was a weapon in a battle for dominance. Call Me By Your Name is similar in its set-up, but the opposite in how it plays out. It puts two strangers in another impossibly glamorous, isolated home and lights the fuse on their attraction, but this one burns long and slow, not fast and angry. Based on André Aciman’s novel, it’s a romance overwhelming in its intensity, a heart that swells until it has to burst.
Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is 17 years old and living in the Italian countryside with his artsy parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar). Handsome, but more boyish than he perhaps believes, Elio is confident and smart, liked by everyone who meets him. Every room he enters is his. But he is thrown off balance by the arrival of Oliver (Armie Hammer), a twentysomething who has come to stay to assist Elio’s father in his work. Oliver looks like the American ideal distilled into a single man. And with his charm, looks and presence outstripped, Elio is immediately transfixed.
Guadagnino’s telling of the development of this romance, which changes both parties, is like the feeling of getting gently drunk. It’s smooth but a little dizzying. He fills every scene with life. Trees are heavy with fruit; people are always eating; the chirping of crickets a constant soundtrack. He thrusts life at you and wills his characters to live theirs. Long summer days drift away in a gentle routine of swimming, cycling and nothing, but each day that passes with feelings unvoiced is a day lost — they will never have it back.
The screenplay, written by James Ivory, is elegant and full of small surprises. The level of attention given to even the smallest of characters means so many of them have an impact even with minimal screen time — Elio’s brief girlfriend breaks your heart with a handful of lines. What few vocal emotional outpourings are present are earned — a paternal monologue by Stuhlbarg in the final minutes is as verbose as the film gets and, good lord, it makes it count (bring tissues). But much is conveyed in the many silences which are entrusted to an excellent cast.
Chalamet is the centre and he gives the kind of performance that immediately sends you to Google to find out where the hell this kid came from (he may be familiar from Interstellar or Homeland). All Elio’s teenage emotions are raw on Chalamet’s skin. He plays him as a person still forming, not scared by his feelings but surprised. In a film in which every performance is terrific, Chalamet makes the rest look like they’re acting. He alone would make the film worth watching, but he’s just one of countless reasons.
"A full-hearted
romantic
masterpiece."
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Yet it’s on the shoulders of Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet that the film lives and dies. Their chemistry is intoxicating, as they dance around each other, quick-witted and trying to decipher the meaning within their relationship. Chalamet is a delight, precocious and yet vulnerable, sensitive and sarcastic and as bright as the North Star. Hammer is the perfect foil, tall and imposing, yet so wholesome and all-American it’s impossible not to be as charmed by him as Elio quickly is.
http://moviemarker.co.uk/call-me-by-your-name-lff-2017/
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW
Call Me by Your Name
#LFF 2017
★★★★★
by Hannah Woodhead
https://hewoodhead.co.uk/
9 Oct 2017
Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name--a familiar sense of pain to anyone who has ever experienced that similar
unique misery of loving an impossible thing.
The coming-of-age story of first love and self-discovery is a genre we see repeated throughout cinematic history time and time again. It takes an exceptional talent to break the mold, but with Call Me By Your Name, director Luca Guadagnino has managed to achieve the unlikely, breathing new life into a genre plagued by cliches and a fear to take risks.
Beautifully adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel of the same name, Call Me By Your Name tells the story of seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet), whose summer vacation in northern Italy is interrupted by the arrival of American graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer), who will stay for six weeks to Elio’s archeologist father (Michael Stuhlbarg). Oliver’s arrival is met with skepticism by Elio, who is displaced from his bedroom and simultaneously irritated and intrigued by his presence. Over the course of the summer, a romance unfolds between Oliver and Elio, set against the dreamy backdrop of the Tuscan countryside. It’s as picture-perfect as a setting comes (one most of us only dream of for our first love) and matched by a beautiful score by master of melancholy Sufjan Stevens, the film has charm in droves. You can practically smell the sweetness of the peach trees and taste the sweat that hangs like dew in the Tuscan summer heat – Guadagnino really brings his story to life through scenery and direction, making it as all-consuming as the subject matter itself.
Yet it’s on the shoulders of Hammer and Chalamet that the film lives and dies. Their chemistry is intoxicating, as they dance around each other, quick-witted and trying to decipher the meaning within their relationship. Chalamet is a delight, precocious and yet vulnerable, sensitive and sarcastic and as bright as the North Star. Hammer is the perfect foil, tall and imposing, yet so wholesome and all-American it’s impossible not to be as charmed by him as Elio quickly is. Hammer brings surprising warmth and depth to Oliver so that the story is as much as him growing as it is the teenage Elio. In finding each other they find the safety and security to mature, and their bittersweet summer romance will bring a familiar sense of pain to anyone who has ever experienced that similar unique misery of loving an impossible thing.
Michael Stuhlbarg is also pitch-perfect as Elio’s eccentric but warm father, who provides his son with infinite wisdom about love. Portrayals of positive father/son relationships in LGBT films are all too rare, and this one feels particularly poignant. Elio and Oliver’s story is just that – a story about two men who happen to fall in love. The taboo of their relationship is not gender but the seven-year age gap between them, and the ultimate tragedy of its fleeting nature. “Better to have tried and failed,” remarks Oliver early in the film. It’s a comment both he and Elio will take to heart.
There is a universality to the themes of longing, loneliness, and desire, and it’s refreshing to see such an honest, fearless, and unapologetically hopeful LGBT story told. Many screenwriters and directors could (and should) take notes from Luca Guadagnino’s masterful playbook. Call Me By Your Name is a rich, visual treat, but its tenderness and charm solidify it as one of the best films of 2017.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version