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Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
We are always aware that time is passing, that summer will soon end and that, as in every other coming of age movie, the characters will have to move on. In some respects, the story here is utterly formulaic. What makes the film so magical is the extraordinary delicacy, formal daring and insight with which Luca Guadagnino tackles such familiar material.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/film-reviews-call-me-by-your-name-grace-jones-documentary-bloodlight-and-bami-perfect-blue-base-a8021076.html
Call Me by Your Name
We are in the 1980s and so the family is able to live in its own timeless, self-enclosed world.
★★★★★
By Geoffrey Macnab
@TheIndyFilm
26 October 2017
Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg and Armie Hammer in Luca Guadagnino’s film Call Me By Your Name
Coming of age films set over long, lazy summers constitute a mini-genre in their own right. Few, though, have the freshness or poignancy of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Based on André Aciman’s 2007 novel, it is an account of a gay affair between a teenage boy and a twentysomething graduate student. What is surprising here is the complete lack of guilt and recrimination. This is not one of those movies like Brokeback Mountain or the recent Yorkshire-set God’s Own Country in which the lovers face a backlash. They enjoy a “beautiful friendship” which means “everything and nothing”, and there is no price to pay at the end of it.
It’s 1983. We are somewhere in northern Italy. The Perlmans are an affluent and highly cultured American-Jewish family who spend their summer months in an idyllic country house not far from Lake Garda. Mr Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) is an easy-going academic who uses his time in Italy not just to eat, drink and relax but to carry out research into classical antiquity. He has a glamorous wife (Amira Casar) and a precocious 17-year-old son, Elio (Timothée Chalamet). Every year, Perlman hires a research assistant to help him with his paperwork and to join him on his field expeditions in search of classical artefacts.
The tempo here is very much more relaxed than in Guadagnino’s 2015 feature A Bigger Splash, which was also about a summer holiday but whose protagonists were wildly hedonistic filmmakers and rock singers. Here, the Perlmans live at a very leisurely pace.
“What does one do around here?” one newcomer asks.
“Wait for the summer to end,” Elio replies, hinting at the repetitive and even sometimes tedious nature of days spent on field trips, bicycle rides or occasional trips to the local post office.
We are clearly in the 1980s. The film has the same Psychedelic Furs music also found in John Hughes’ bratpack movies of that era to remind us of the fact. However, Guadagnino is also continually making the point that his characters are sharing the same experiences as the classical figures Perlman spends his life researching.
This is a film in which tiny, seemingly throwaway incidents assume, at least in hindsight, a huge totemic importance. We see Elio looking down from a high window with curiosity at the strapping, self-confident young American academic, Oliver (Armie Hammer), stepping out of a car as he arrives to work as Mr Perlman’s assistant. Elio is irritated because he has had to give his bedroom to the newcomer. There is a strange moment in which Oliver is showing off his athletic ability playing volleyball with the locals and then touches Elio on the shoulder.
Elio is a mix of arrogance and vulnerability. He can be very cruel. His behaviour toward the beautiful young neighbour Marzia (Esther Garrel) with whom he begins a short-lived affair is offhand in the extreme. She is the only one in the film really made to suffer.
Call Me By Your Name was co-scripted by James Ivory (the filmmaker behind Remains Of The Day, A Room With A View, Maurice and all those other upscale literary adaptations). Ivory was originally going to direct too but he would surely have made a very different kind of film. Guadagnino has a formal boldness, flamboyance and willingness to push his material to extremes that Ivory lacks. In particular, he deals in frank and sometimes comic fashion with the sexuality of the adolescent hero. Elio is capable of some very crude behaviour. We see him masturbating into an overripe piece of fruit and burying his head in his lover’s swimming trunks. The director also has a fetishistic way of filming the lovers’ bodies, as if they are contemporary equivalents to the young gods portrayed in the classical art that so fascinates Elio’s father.
Hammer is exceptional in a role a very long way removed from The Man From UNCLE or The Lone Ranger. He plays Oliver as a dashing narcissist who expects everything to come easily to him. “Later!” is his habitual expression when he leaves a social gathering because he has somewhere better to go to. He is always on the lookout for his own pleasure. At the same time, there is nothing predatory in his relationship with Elio. If anything, Elio is the one who targets him. Timothée Chalamet is equally striking as the teenager desperate for new experiences, on the cusp of adulthood and trying to work out his own identity. Both lovers are outsiders. They know, as one puts it, “what it’s oike toi be the odd Jew out”. Perhaps the most surprising performance is from Stuhlbarg as the wise and endlessly patient father who knows exactly what is going on.
As in A Bigger Splash, Guadagnino films landscape in a Sunday supplement travel-brochure-like way. With its sequences of idyllic bike rides down country lanes, dips in outdoor pools, moonlight dancing and long leisurely outdoor lunches in romantic settings, Call Me By Your Name offers an idealised, tourist-eye view of its little corner of northern Italy. The weather (at least until the equally picturesque snowbound scenes late on) is always balmy. We are in the 1980s and so the family is able to live in its own timeless, self-enclosed world. Elio may watch TV and listen to his battered old transistor radio but there are no smartphones to distract them.
We are always aware that time is passing, that summer will soon end and that, as in every other coming of age movie, the characters will have to move on. In some respects, the story here is utterly formulaic. What makes the film so magical is the extraordinary delicacy, formal daring and insight with which Guadagnino tackles such familiar material.
Director. Luca Guadagnino, 132 mins
Starring: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel, Victoire Du Bois
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Peter Spears
@pjspears
5:22 AM - 27 Oct 2017
159 Retweets 592 Likes
https://twitter.com/pjspears?lang=en&lang=en
https://twitter.com/pjspears/status/923887507145707521
Call Me By Your Name opens today in UK
meanwhile back in LA a friend
sent me this photo of a new billboard on Sunset Blvd.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANART
http://www.gramunion.com/olga-jl.tumblr.com
by Never Too Late (olga-jl)
http://www.gramunion.com/olga-jl.tumblr.com/163978021544
http://laterpeaches.tumblr.com/post/164022101411
http://www.gramunion.com/olga-jl.tumblr.com
http://www.gramunion.com/olga-jl.tumblr.com/163978021544
http://laterpeaches.tumblr.com/post/164022101411
http://www.gramunion.com/olga-jl.tumblr.com
Timmy
by Never Too Late (olga-jl)
10th august 2017 391 Likes
#timothée chalamet #elio #elio perlman #armie hammer #oliver #ulliva #actor
#call me by your name #cmbyn #andré aciman #luca guadagnino #lgbt
#movies #film #lgbtmovie #oscar
#art #my art #artist #portrait #pencil drawing #drawing #fanart
#Black and White #man #boy
#Never Too Late
#later!
CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANART by Never Too Late (olga-jl)
http://www.gramunion.com/olga-jl.tumblr.com
From:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/mediaviewer/rm745548544
Also see:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on October 25, 2017, 09:00:25 pm --- by @carolamarin.art
http://imgrid.net/tag/cmbyn_art/J0HWepRygAAAF0HWdKBawAAAFiYA
http://imgrid.net/post/1614034811022070405_3473631519
http://imgrid.net/user/carolamarin.art/
http://instagram.com/carolamarin.art
https://twitter.com/hashtag/cmbyn
http://imgrid.net/tag/cmbyn_art/
The boy of the year! So young and yet so talented!
by @carolamarin.art
Sep 30 2017 318 Likes
--- End quote ---
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://lwlies.com/articles/lwlies-71-the-call-me-by-your-name-issue/
http://mazonluis.com/
Call Me by Your Name by Luis Mazón
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 03, 2017, 09:39:59 pm ---http://shop.littlewhitelies.co.uk/product/little-white-lies-71-the-call-me-by-your-name-issue
Little White Lies 71: The Call Me by Your Name issuehttps://twitter.com/search?q=%23CallMeByYourName%2C
https://twitter.com/SonyPicturesUK
Little White Lies 71: The Call Me by Your Name issue
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 26, 2017, 09:31:58 pm ---CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANMERCH
http://lito-and-hernando.tumblr.com/
https://callmebyyourname-movie.tumblr.com/
My 'little white lies' magazine finally arrived!!!
Beyond happy rn!!!
https://callmebyyourname-movie.tumblr.com/post/165566359581/lito-and-hernando-my-lwl-magazine-finally#notes
http://lito-and-hernando.tumblr.com/post/165550015653/my-lwl-magazine-finally-arrived-beyond-happyhttps://feedy.online/article/589329-elio
https://callmebyyourname-movie.tumblr.com/post/165566359581/lito-and-hernando-my-lwl-magazine-finally#notes
http://lito-and-hernando.tumblr.com/post/165550015653/my-lwl-magazine-finally-arrived-beyond-happy
https://callmebyyourname-movie.tumblr.com/post/165566359581/lito-and-hernando-my-lwl-magazine-finally#notes
http://lito-and-hernando.tumblr.com/post/165550015653/my-lwl-magazine-finally-arrived-beyond-happyhttps://feedy.online/article/589329-elio
https://callmebyyourname-movie.tumblr.com/post/165566359581/lito-and-hernando-my-lwl-magazine-finally#notes
http://lito-and-hernando.tumblr.com/post/165550015653/my-lwl-magazine-finally-arrived-beyond-happy
--- End quote ---
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://lwlies.com/articles/lwlies-71-the-call-me-by-your-name-issue/
http://lwlies.com/articles/call-me-by-your-name-book-queer-phenomenon/
How
Call Me by Your Name
became a queer literary phenomenon
Fans of André Aciman’s 2007 novel
reflect on what makes it so special.
By CLAIRE BIDDLES
PUBLISHED 21 OCT 2017
The first time I read ‘Call Me by Your Name’ I stayed up until 4am to finish it, then immediately started over again. I’d read dozens of queer coming-of-age novels, dozens of bittersweet love stories, but nothing quite like this – a story of a once-in-a-lifetime love between precocious 17-year-old Italian Elio and 20-something cocksure American academic Oliver, played out over a brief six week period but recalled over and over for a lifetime.
It felt like the oldest story ever told and a freshly drawn secret, as though its writer, André Aciman, had articulated a collective memory of longing for the very first time. Its beauty lay in its diminutive moments, in its long, drawn-out descriptions of seconds-long glances between Elio and Oliver. My reaction during that first reading was almost more physical than intellectual, something more akin to a crush on a person, or a the way a heart skips during a particular key change in a pop song. It certainly wasn’t anything I had experienced reading a book before.
Before its release, Aciman was known for his nonfiction, chronicling his early life in the 1995 memoir ‘Out of Egypt’, and collating criticism on the work of Marcel Proust for the 2001 essay collection ‘The Proust Project’ .‘Call Me by Your Name’ is his first novel, and it is all the more miraculous because it seemingly came from nowhere.
Since its release in 2007, the book has been a slow-burn kind of literary sensation, gaining new fans through enthusiastic word-of-mouth. Jim MacSweeney, manager of Gay’s the Word, the UK’s only dedicated LGBT bookshop, has seen the popularity of the book grow from the very beginning: “We sold a few copies when it first came out, then noticed that people were coming back to buy second copies for friends,” he tells me. “It’s always been an easy book to sell – it’s a love story, but it’s not sentimental. It captures something that we all feel but that is rare in fiction. It’s a really special book.”
It’s difficult to quantify what makes the book so special, what makes it so resonant in a sea of thousands and thousands of love stories, so much so that it has become a personal talisman for its thousands of fans. Sarah Dollard, a London-based screenwriter for Doctor Who and Being Human, and a huge fan of CMBYN, describes the first time she read the book: “It was less thinking and more… feeling. A lot. Clutching the book to my chest, tearful sighs… I read a lot of romance, about half of it queer, and most of it follows a formula. Not to sniff at formula – I only read writers who wield it beautifully. But CMBYN doesn’t do that, it is its own thing. A gorgeously written gut punch.”
This tension of physicality and emotional potency came up again and again when I spoke to other fans of the book. When Rachel Huskey, a student from Texas, first read it, she “didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, I just remember laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about this novel for over an hour. That had never happened to me before, it just struck me so harshly in my chest and I didn’t know how to feel. My diary entry from that day says, ‘I have a fierce desire to consume this book and I don’t know how to do it.’”
When I re-read the book last year, spurned on by the announcement of the film adaptation, it was alongside two of my friends who were reading it for the first time. We would gather in a Twitter group chat every day to pore over details of each chapter, and – crucially – discuss frankly how it revealed integral truths of the possibilities of love and desire to us, which felt especially powerful in the muddy contemporary midst of casual dating and impersonal hookup apps.
One of the other participants in this informal book club, Sophie, recalls how, “every one of our interpretations and reactions to this novel was valid, vivid, and valued. Recollections of old loves, missed opportunities, the anger and disappoint of our current stumbles through the wilds of 2010s dating… This book stripped things from me that I hid from myself, it opened up what I want love – or the idea of love – to be, and how I want my muscles to burn as I reach out for it. Like Elio, looking back over that summer with each added year of wisdom and lived experience, each re-read of CMBYN feels like a space to reflect, and hone our own needs through the lens of this one specific romance.”
For all that CMBYN describes complex romantic and sexual feelings that almost everyone can match themselves up to, it’s also full of the specificities of queer experience, refreshingly removed from the constraints of a traditional coming-out narrative. Josh Winters, a writer and musician from San Francisco, recognises the importance of this for queer readers: “Many stories about young men coming to terms with their sexuality are concerned with how they navigate the “coming out” process, usually framing it as a required rite of passage (which is it not), but Aciman is purely interested in exploring how a young man comes to embrace his desire for another man removed from any idea of potential sociopolitical impact.” It’s this removal from blatantly political context that is an unspoken requirement of queer novels that makes CMBYN so refreshing.
Eoin Dara, a curator based in Dundee, addressed the duality of the universal and the specifically queer in an email to me: “The language of longing and desire and uncertainty could be about any blossoming love affair, it’s pretty expansive and universal. But then in other ways, it’s so inexplicably caught up in the invisible politics of queer desire; the politics of looking. I love how it focuses detail so minutely on eye contact in parts: Something that’s so central to queer communication – silent, unspoken understandings and messages that bounce around public space and crowded rooms full of oblivious straights.”
There’s nothing more anxiety-inducing than the anticipation of a new version of something you love so, so much – especially if its whole worth and magic lies in its atmospherics and coded glances; the most difficult things to translate to film. It’s these ephemeral details that are most anticipated among fans of the book. “There’s a lot of small things about the story that are what give the big scenes their value,” says Rachel. “The footsie, the touch during volleyball… it’s about them being so syndicated with each other that they don’t hide anything anymore.”
Jim echoes this sentiment: “Not that much happens in the book: It’s about tension, desire, longing, rather than big events. I last read it 10 years ago and I don’t even remember the character names, but what I do remember is how Aciman captures that feeling of being aware of another person in a room, and that being all that matters. And I’m interested to see how that is translated in the film.” When asked about seeing the film, Eoin confesses that “I’m so nervous about seeing it. I hope the script is sparse, I hope the looks are long.”
In February this year, I queued up outside a cinema at the Berlinale, shaking equal parts with late-winter cold and with nerves about seeing Call Me by Your Name for the first time. I shared the same concerns as other fans of the book: This was such a precious thing, I felt like I owned it to an extent – how could I trust anyone else to understand it so fully, to feel it so completely? But the film was wonderful, lacking some of the specific narrative details of the book but so rich with what was really important: the feeling, the atmosphere, the intangibility. It is perfectly cast and perfectly paced. I wept solidly for the last 45 minutes, feeling slightly embarrassed when the lights came up and the rush of reality set back in.
There must have been a thousand people in the packed-out cinema, but it still felt like mine. “Now that the trailers are out and the press is being done in the lead up to the film’s release, it does feel a bit like when your little secret band makes it big,” says Sophie. “But now that it’s more widespread, I still don’t have a desire to discuss it beyond my little group. I am much more fulfilled to pass an image of farmer’s market peaches, or buy an exceptionally loose and wind-swept shirt to keep CMBYN present and tangible outside of the page.”
As more and more people are drawn to the book through the film release, and through passed-on copies, word-of-mouth recommendations and informal book clubs like ours, its pages will still be there for me – for all of us – as an intimate, personal comfort, to be read and felt until early in the morning for years to come.
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