The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Showtimes
Monday 11/6
6:45 PM Sie FilmCenter DFF
https://denverfilmfestival.denverfilm.org/
https://secure.denverfilm.org/festival/film/programdetail.aspx?FID=100&PID=353
https://secure.denverfilm.org/tickets/film.aspx?id=29737&FID=100Special PresentationCall Me by Your NameDir. Luca Guadagnino
Historical/Period, LGBTQ, Literary, Romance
CinemaQ, Special Presentation
English, Italian, French, German | English Subtitles | Italy/France, 2017, 132m
It's the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, where 17-year-old Elio spends his days in his family's villa playing classical music, reading and flirting with his friend Marzia. With academics for parents—his father is an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture, his mother Annella a translator—Elio is a precocious sort. But if he has the intellectual maturity of an adult, there is nevertheless much that yet remains innocent and unformed about him, particularly when it comes to matters of the heart.
Enter Oliver (Armie Hammer), a charming American doctoral candidate hired as a summer intern for Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of the setting, Elio discovers the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a season that will alter his life forever.
Based on an acclaimed novel, the screenplay for this sensual and transcendent coming-of-age tale from Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino was penned by none other than that master of exquisite longing, James Ivory (A Room With a View, The Remains of the Day).
Producer: Emilie Georges, Luca Guadagnino, James Ivory, Marco Morabito, Howard Rosenman, Peter Spears, Rodrigo Teixeira
Editor: Walter Fasano | Cinematographer: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom | Screenwriter: James Ivory
Cast: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel
Additional Countries: France, Brazil, USA
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Timothée Chalamet’s Elio is Jewish, French, Italian, American and seventeen. His family spends their summers in Crema, a small town which feels plucked out of paradise and one that plays host to both leisurely bike rides and intense summer flings. Everything is normal and boring and relaxing until his father’s latest research assistant, Armie Hammer’s Oliver, takes over Elio’s bedroom for the summer. Elio moves into the room next door, sharing only a bathroom (the most intimate of spaces) with Oliver while the two maintain their distance. That is of course until their mutual back-and-forth of glances and flirtatious arguments lead to them dropping all pretense in front of one another, building protective walls around their affair in the process.
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/10/04/nyff-review-call-me-by-your-name-like-getting-lost-in-secrets
film society lincoln center NYFF55/2017
Luca Guadagnino's
Call Me by Your Name
Like Getting Lost In Secrets.
by SIDDHANT ADLAKHA
Wednesday Oct 4 2017
Warmth incarnate, tenderness and bittersweet joy: Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name
NEW YORK -- Luca Guadagnino's latest is both alluring and alienating in equal measure. That’s part and parcel of its beauty. It forgoes the idea of a larger plot or structure – there is no broader conceit underscoring its will-they, won’t-they – instead choosing the interplay of secrets as its grounding point, as its lead characters engage in dance. Sometimes the dance is literal - the outward expression of music and rhythm on an Italian summer night. Other times the dance is the mere proximity of bodies and feelings, stepping backward, forward and back again, figuring out when to take the next step. As much as Call Me By Your Name is “about” an academic researcher getting it on with his professor’s son (to be fair, Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalomet in shorts in the ‘80s ought to be reason enough), what it’s about is the complex nature of sexual and romantic secrecy, in all its joys and sorrows.
That it feels almost entirely unstructured works both against it and in its favour. Its two-hour runtime feels closer to three, owing to there being no discernible goalposts nor any indication of how long these lovers have left in their summertime romp, but is that necessarily a complaint when even its most drawn-out scenes focus on a pair of bodies and souls figuring each other out as they begin to figure out themselves? It exists almost detached from time, in a dreamlike state with scenes playing out like vignettes of varying lengths, beginning and ending (often abruptly) at heightened moments, but every scene is imbued with tenderness and bittersweet joy.
Chalomet’s Elio is Jewish, French, Italian, American and seventeen. His family spends their summers in Crema, a small town which feels plucked out of paradise and one that plays host to both leisurely bike rides and intense summer flings. Everything is normal and boring and relaxing until his father’s latest research assistant, Armie Hammer’s Oliver, takes over Elio’s bedroom for the summer. Elio moves into the room next door, sharing only a bathroom (the most intimate of spaces) with Oliver while the two maintain their distance. That is of course until their mutual back-and-forth of glances and flirtatious arguments lead to them dropping all pretense in front of one another, building protective walls around their affair in the process.
Timothée Chalomet is tremendous as Elio. His adolescent bravado in front of his summer girlfriend gives way to hunched over insecurities in private as he discovers a newfound sense of duality with Oliver, one he has no idea how to navigate. As much as he tries to play it cool, the profound weight of his self-discovery is terrifying. While the presence of the older, more experienced Oliver is the genesis for his confusion, he is also Elio’s comfort. Chalomet and Armie Hammer light up the screen with their chemistry, forming the kind of camaraderie you could get lost in. There’s a boyish playfulness to their dynamic, even as Oliver is at first wary of taking advantage of Elio’s fragility, but he too settles into his desires as Hammer’s own no-nonsense bluntness and brevity give way to protective empathy.
The new world that opens up in front of Elio isn’t just one of sex and romance. While there is liberation in sharing something pure and beautiful with Oliver it’s also a dynamic that must exist in secret, a constant changing of states that Oliver is accustomed to but one Elio still needs to figure out. There is no immediate danger per se – Elio’s parents, played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar – seem open and accepting, and his affair with Oliver may very well be an open secret, yet the result of these lowered immediate stakes is the opportunity for the film to delve inward. There is a world outside of this bubble and an expiration date to whatever Elio and Oliver have, but the knowledge of its temporariness and finality isn’t framed as some dour, nihilistic sentiment. Stuhlbarg for instance, ends up the most warm and welcoming part of the film, his personable, paternal smile offering hope and comfort even in times of emotional disarray.
Elio may not be ready to come out by the end of it. He may not even be ready to accept himself, and the world may not be ready to accept him either, yet there comes a point in the film where he apes Oliver by proudly sporting a Star of David around his neck. Oliver, a child of New England, knows what it’s like to be the only Jew in the vicinity and for Elio, whose multi-cultural family describes themselves as “Jews of discretion,” that means knowing which parts of one’s identity to put on display. With yet another major social code to switch, the burden of identity could very well be overwhelming, but Oliver’s presence, like that of Call Me By Your Name itself, acts as a guiding hand, making him less afraid to simply be.
Call Me By Your Name will open in New York and Los Angeles on November 24.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/10/14/call-me-by-your-name-sequel-possible
We May Be Getting A Sequel To
Call Me by Your Name
Director Luca Guadagnino drops some juicy hints.
by SIDDHANT ADLAKHA
Saturiday Oct 14 2017
Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name
Call Me By Your Name hasn't been released in theatres yet, but as one of the best reviewed films out of both Sundance and the New York Film Festival, it's rightly receiving a lot of buzz. Some of that buzz now includes plans for a sequel, which would be in line with the film as it relates to André Aciman's original novel from 2007. You should probably steer clear of the rest of this article if you're looking to avoid spoilers, but that'd also be like trying to "spoil" the premise of [Director Richard Linklater's] Before Sunset or Before Midnight, comparisons I don't make lightly given just how good Luca Guadagnino's latest is.
While speaking to ScreenDaily, Guadagnino shared a few details about a potential follow-up. Aciman's novel has Oliver and Elio meet up in America fifteen years after the events in Italy, though the potential sequel film doesn't seem like it's going to follow this to the letter since it'll take place only seven years later: ( https://www.screendaily.com/news/luca-guadagnino-plots-call-me-by-your-name-sequel-exclusive/5123280.article )
“I want to do a sequel because Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel – they are all gems,” said Guadagnino during a sit-down at the BFI London Film Festival, where Call Me By Your Name played as a gala. “The texture we built together is very consistent. We created a place in which you believe in the world before them. They are young but they are growing up.”
“I don’t think Elio is necessarily going to become a gay man. He hasn’t found his place yet. I can tell you that I believe that he would start an intense relationship with Marzia [Esther Garrel’s character] again,” he said.
That second bit might raise some eyebrows from people who haven't seen the film given how much acclaim it's receiving for its intimate portrait of a same-sex releationship, though it should be noted that Guadagnino (a gay man himself) is not speaking out of turn, as his depiction of Elio and Oliver's sexualities is both complex and difficult to pin down at this stage in their lives. Guadagnino also envisions Elio as the kind of character who could recur throughout his filmography (much like Truffaut's Antoine Doinel), though if I'm being honest, what I really want is Armie Hammer dancing to songs from various decades.
The sequel, should it happen, won't be released until 2020, but it's already a damn exciting prospect. We'll keep you posted as soon as we hear more.
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 28, 2017, 01:42:13 pm ---
"I think I'll make another film in the future about the characters in Call Me by Your Name. I'd love to make a cycle of films based on them. How they grow up. Will they meet again? What happens when they meet again?"
Do you know?? I've been thinking this! The very last five pages of the book (at the end of Part 4, "Ghost Spots") have a very open-ended quality, no?? Obviously Luca, André and producer Peter Spears have talked about it. Shades of director Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), which I have always loved!
FYI: Richard Linklater: No one’s ruling out a Before quadrilogy, FEBRUARY 27, 2017,
http://ew.com/movies/2017/02/27/richard-linklater-before-sunset-trilogy/
Celine (Julie Delpy): "Baby. You are going to miss that plane." (talk-singing along with Nina Simone to Jesse)
Jesse (Ethan Hawke): "I know." (laughs)
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip9PgKmil0s[/youtube]
Before Sunset (2004)
Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke
(by director Richard Linklater)
Published on Apr 9, 2015
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 28, 2017, 11:47:30 am ---
Luca Guadagnino for Fantastic Man Magazine No. 26
"I think I'll make another film in the future about the characters in Call Me by Your Name. I'd love to make a cycle of films based on them. How they grow up. Will they meet again? What happens when they meet again?"
Director Luca Guadagnino delivers an interview vérité in the new issue of @ManFantastic ahead of the worldwide release of his spectacularly romantic new movie Call Me by Your Name.
#LucaGuadagnino #CallMeByYourName
#FantasticMan #Cinema #Art #Culture #KarlaOtto
http://www.buro247.ua/instagram/karlaotto/570496
--- End quote ---
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Powerfully emotional and exquisitely romantic, this is a beautifully made and wonderfully acted film that has every element working together in perfect harmony. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece.
https://inews.co.uk/essentials/culture/film/call-me-by-your-name-review/
News The Essential Daily Briefing
Call Me by Your Name
This nostalgic coming-of-age romance is one of the year’s best films.
★★★★★
by Matthew Turner
Thursday Oct 26 2017
An emotional masterpiece: Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name
Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalomet star in this achingly romantic tale of first love from director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash). Adapted from André Aciman’s 2007 coming-of-age and coming out novel by screenwriter James Ivory, this is one of the year’s best films. A heady concoction of love, life and longing, suffused with a warm glow of nostalgia.
Set in 1983, the film centres on musically gifted 17 year-old Elio Perlman (Chalamet), who is spending the summer at his family’s palazzo in Northern Italy. When 24 year-old graduate student Oliver (Hammer) arrives to help Elio’s antiquities professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) with his research, Elio becomes obsessed with him, their erotic proximity heightened by having to share an adjoining bathroom. As the days pass, Elio is thrilled to discover the intensity of his feelings for Oliver reciprocated, and the pair embark on a secret love affair. Guadagnino’s direction is exceptional, creating a richly evocative atmosphere that perfectly captures the intoxicating rush of first love.
Bittersweet atmosphere
In particular, Guadagnino perfectly captures the specific sense of time and place, depicting the family’s fabulously idyllic existence (al fresco dinners, trips to the local swimming hole, bike rides into town, etc), all of which is heightened by a nostalgia-inducing soundtrack and gorgeous cinematography from Sayombhu Mukdeeprom that’s so transporting you can practically feel the sun shining on your face.
However, there’s a bittersweet note too, because there’s the constant sense that both the summer and the relationship will shortly come to an end. Guadagnino orchestrates a number of wonderful sequences, particularly in the first half of the film, where the characters are effectively circling each other and every gesture and look is ripe with potential meaning. Though the film ultimately shies away from anything too explicit, there’s a scene involving the erotic use of a peach that is destined for instant notoriety and somehow manages to be tender, funny and shocking, all at once. (Let’s just say Philip Roth would have been proud).
Profoundly moving
Previously best known for Homeland, relative newcomer Chalamet delivers a star-making performance as Elio, his expressive face and body language conveying a complex array of emotions, with minimal dialogue. Similarly, Hammer (who continues to make interesting choices) delivers his best performance to date, turning his all-American golden boy charisma up to the maxium setting and sparking palpable chemistry with Chalamet. The film is largely dominated by the two leads, but the ever-reliable Michael Stuhlbarg has a terrific father-son speech towards the end of the film that is profoundly moving and likely to lead to a few tear-stained cheeks.
As if the whole thing wasn’t heavenly enough already, Guadagnino brings down the curtain with a wonderful final shot that ranks as one of the best endings to a film in recent memory.
Powerfully emotional and exquisitely romantic, this is a beautifully made and wonderfully acted film that has every element working together in perfect harmony. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
It’s summertime and the living is easy. Against the backdrop of unhurried life at a villa in Lombardy, the emotions of the 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) jangle and thrum like guitar strings as he becomes gradually besotted with Oliver (Armie Hammer), his professor father’s 24-year-old research assistant, who is staying with the family for six weeks.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/film/2017/10/call-me-your-name-emotionally-charged-love-affair-taut-inner-tensions
Call Me by Your Name
An emotionally charged love affair taut with inner tensions
Luca Guadagnino is an intensely sensual director, but he knows how to undercut a moment.
by RYAN GILBEY
27 October 2017
In Call Me by Your Name a pounding piano reproduces Elio’s desires in musical form as Timothée Chalamet plays to Armie Hammer.
Most love stories require an impediment against which the central romance can be tested. I love you but we’re married to other people (Brief Encounter). I love you but you’re dying (Love Story), or dead (Ghost ). I love you but I’m a diplomat’s wife and you’re a chimpanzee (Max Mon Amour).
What’s peculiar about Call Me by Your Name is the lack of any external resistance to the gay love affair at the heart of the story. No homophobia, no disapproving peers or parents. The film, adapted from André Aciman’s 2007 novel, is set in northern Italy in 1983, just before fears about HIV and Aids would have impinged on these characters’ lives. It’s equally important that this is an era that predates mobile phones. No one can express their feelings with a winking cartoon face or an upturned aubergine. It has to be done for real.
The achievement of the director Luca Guadagnino is to create in the absence of any obvious opposition a picture that is still taut with inner tensions. It’s summertime and the living is easy. Against the backdrop of unhurried life at a villa in Lombardy, the emotions of the 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) jangle and thrum like guitar strings as he becomes gradually besotted with Oliver (Armie Hammer), his professor father’s 24-year-old research assistant, who is staying with the family for six weeks.
Two things snag his interest. The first is the Star of David that Oliver wears, nestling in his chest hair. (Elio is also Jewish, though his mother describes the family as “Jews of discretion”.) The second is Oliver’s easy physicality. Elio is startled to receive a shoulder massage from him while watching a volleyball game. Squirming free, he is hauled back by the older man, who then enlists a nearby teenage girl to continue the massage. It’s the first in a series of gestures that involve puppetry of some description. The next occurs when Elio clocks Oliver’s attraction to a local woman and tries to play matchmaker between them, much to Oliver’s displeasure. Tellingly, when they make up, it is through another act of puppeteering: Oliver extends the hand of friendship to Elio, only it isn’t his own hand but the one attached to a sculpted, disembodied arm. The film charts the dismantling of their defences as they move beyond preening and proxies towards an ideal of intimacy.
With a handful of exceptions, the film is told from Elio’s heightened, hormonal perspective. At the sound of a bicycle bell, the camera might pan round distractedly to see where it is coming from. The sudden cut when Oliver rolls off the side of the pool and into the water mimics Elio’s electrified jumpiness. Chalamet’s performance is enchantingly physical, even feline. He keeps breaking out into unselfconscious dance moves – a soft-shoe shuffle or a prance like a cartoon burglar’s tiptoed prowl. A pounding piano reproduces Elio’s desires in musical form and the reflective new songs by Sufjan Stevens introduce the possibility that he is looking back on all this from middle age.
It’s an idea that Guadagnino pursues near the end of the film, when Oliver is watching Elio sleep. He swivels his head in response to a noise that is audible to us also, but turns out to be the sound of a train drawing into a station the following morning. Guadagnino (a former film critic and the director of I Am Love and A Bigger Splash) will know that his countryman Sergio Leone used a ringing telephone to tie together a montage spanning several different time periods in Once Upon a Time in America. The effect here strikes the same note of disorienting melancholy, as though the characters were waking from dreams wreathed in memories.
Guadagnino is an intensely sensual director, almost parodically so, but he knows how to undercut a moment so that its emotional charge is deferred. When Oliver and Elio finally broach the subject of their mutual attraction, they are shown in a wide shot, separated from one another by a statue commemorating the Battle of the Piave River and almost drowned out by the hydraulic hiss of an approaching bus. Anyone would think the driver didn’t know that two men were confessing their love for one another and changing the course of their lives.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version