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Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
But Guadagnino never turns the temperature down. The heat generated by, say, an index finger stroking a lower lip—that digit soon to be lightly nibbled and sucked by the mouth it is caressing—could burn a hole through the screen.
http://www.4columns.org/anderson-melissa/call-me-by-your-name
4Columns
Call Me by Your Name
Melissa Anderson
November 17 2017
Amore caldo!
Director Luca Guadagnino adapts André Aciman’s tale of summer love.
Art by Nikko Tan Sept 26, 2017
https://yotagram.com/p/1611937636757317796/
https://yotagram.com/cmbyn_art/
https://twitter.com/chroniclikerrr
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 29, 2017, 01:15:16 am ---
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Call Me by Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino, opening
November 24, 2017, in New York and Los Angeles
• • •
Languor, lust; yearning, yielding: Call Me by Your Name—a sexy, melancholy summer idyll directed by the supreme cine-sybarite Luca Guadagnino—lushly shows how desire is deftly articulated, even when not explicitly labeled or spoken. The title is a carnal directive, pillow talk shared by two same-sex lovers, seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and twentysomething Oliver (Armie Hammer). The words gay or homosexual are never uttered in the film; the terms would be redundant, meager for what is so rapturously enacted.
Call Me by Your Name, like Guadagnino’s earlier eros-fueled films I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015), teems with voluptuousness. Each movie is a celebration of hedonism among the affluent and is set wholly or partially in a visually ravishing part of Italy: San Remo, where an unfulfilled haute-bourgeoise wife played by Tilda Swinton ruts al fresco with a younger chef in I Am Love ; Pantelleria, a volcanic island off the coast of Sicily that serves as the backdrop for the debauchery of an intergenerational quartet in A Bigger Splash. Opening text in Guadagnino’s latest identifies the location only as “somewhere in northern Italy”; a scan of the press notes reveals that the film was shot in the bucolic town of Crema, where the director himself lives. (The estival glory of the Lombardy region is further showcased by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who here shoots on 35mm. He’s a frequent collaborator of another sensualist auteur, the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.)
The change in setting is one of many alterations, both large and small, from the film’s source material, André Aciman’s debut 2007 novel of the same name, which situates the action in an unnamed spot on the Italian Riviera. Aciman’s book is also slightly vague about its exact chronology; all we know is that its central romance takes place “in the mid-eighties.” Guadagnino’s movie, in contrast, assigns a specific year—1983—for its libidinous hot-weather splendor.
These are ultimately superficial amendments, though, for what survives beautifully intact in the page-to-screen transfer is the book’s intricately calibrated mood and tone. A Proust scholar, Aciman structures his novel as Elio’s remembrance of things past. Guadagnino’s film dispenses with that framing device; there is no first-person voice-over (or narration of any kind) looking back from the vantage, and the wisdom, of the present. But a dolorous prolepsis haunts every tender, arousing moment in the movie—instances that are fated to die almost as soon as they’re born. Significantly, Call Me by Your Name was scripted by James Ivory, that longtime paragon, along with his work and life partner Ismail Merchant (who died in 2005), of decorous, mezzo-brow cinema, such as the seemingly countless E.M. Forster adaptations they oversaw in the 1980s and ’90s. Guadagnino’s film may be less sexually explicit and candid than Aciman’s text, which matter-of-factly discusses the next-day physical sensations after anal sex. But Guadagnino never turns the temperature down. The heat generated by, say, an index finger stroking a lower lip—that digit soon to be lightly nibbled and sucked by the mouth it is caressing—could burn a hole through the screen.
Elio first glimpses the young man who will consume him completely from his bedroom window, on the second story of the villa that his Euro-American family—the Perlmans, “Jews of discretion”—occupies during the summer and winter holidays. Oliver, a Heraclitus scholar from the States who proudly sports a Star of David necklace, has arrived for a six-week stay at the Perlman home, a residency that requires him to assist Elio’s dad (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of antiquities, with some light administrative tasks. (Oliver’s age is given as twenty-four in the book but never specified in the film.) Peering down with Elio at this tall, exceedingly confident and charismatic visitor is Marzia (Esther Garrel), the teenager’s coeval and friend, sometimes a non-platonic one.
A beloved, precocious only child, Elio may spend his days transcribing and playing Bach and reading Conrad, but certain semaphores convey his contemporary passions: his Talking Heads T-shirt, various posters—one of Peter Gabriel, another, perhaps a little too tellingly, of Robert Mapplethorpe—hanging in his bedroom, which he soon relinquishes to the strapping Yank postdoc. “You’re bigger than your picture,” Professor Perlman says, with a mixture of awe and alarm, to Oliver as soon as he steps out of the cab.
The adolescent gazes at Oliver—who crashes out, in a jet-lagged stupor, on Elio’s bed with his Converse high-tops still on—with a similar reaction. But at the breakfast table the next morning, when Oliver, in an off-hand comment about his insatiable appetite (for soft-boiled eggs) and his need to curb it, intimates both the enormity of his hunger and a keen self-awareness (“I know myself”), Elio finds that his own ravenousness has been stoked.
Most of the first half of Call Me by Your Name captures the ambiguous gestures (Oliver giving a quick shoulder massage to Elio, who initially recoils) and coy flirtation (Elio casually showing off at the piano for Oliver) that feed, if only in slight portions, each young man’s increasing hunger for the other. These signals, some bolder than others, make up an exquisite—but never precious—choreography, leading up to what looks like a Judson Dance pas de deux at the town square, where Elio and Oliver acknowledge their attraction, in, unsurprisingly, the most circumlocutory way: “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” the older guy asks the younger one.
However evasive their language, their bodies know exactly how to communicate after this initial admission, including when to pause and when to linger. The seconds that precede a deep kiss between Elio and Oliver rank among the sexiest of screen caesuras, a respite during which a spectator is invited to recall similar scenarios she may have found herself in, even while her attention remains focused on the bodies, the lives, the desires of the two men in front of her.
Regarding those bodies: I’ve watched Call Me by Your Name two times, and, to paraphrase the Greek philosopher whom Oliver specializes in, no viewer ever sees the same movie twice. Where Hammer, golden, towering, bronzed, built—a “steak,” to use a colleague’s apt description—struck me as the film’s corporeal center on my initial viewing, the frail, ephebic Chalamet now seems, paradoxically, the movie’s most vital and vigorous figure after the second. What the actor does with his mouth, his eyes, and his breathing rhythms in the movie’s gutting closing scene wordlessly demonstrates the fluency of his multilingual character in another kind of idiom, mastered in a summer-immersion program.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns. From November 2015 until September 2017, she was the senior film critic for the Village Voice. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and Bookforum.
southendmd:
Just think! Last September (2016), I had been barely 5 miles away from Bordighera!
Joey and I were staying near the next town up, Ventimiglia.
Of course, I hadn't read the book at that time...
Here's our little bit of heaven:
--- Quote --- André Aciman
@aaciman
7:18 AM - 26 Oct 2016
3 Retweets 27 Likes
https://twitter.com/aaciman?lang=en
https://twitter.com/aaciman/status/791282872879546369
I'll be giving a talk in Bordighera this weekend. Can't wait. It's my favorite spot in the planet.
--- End quote ---
southendmd:
Oh, and my poster arrived today.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: southendmd on November 20, 2017, 02:43:40 pm ---Oh, and my poster arrived today.
--- End quote ---
Collect'em all! :laugh: :laugh:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on August 01, 2017, 04:49:33 pm ---
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Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: southendmd on November 20, 2017, 02:17:41 pm ---Just think! Last September (2016), I had been barely 5 miles away from Bordighera!
Joey and I were staying near the next town up, Ventimiglia.
Of course, I hadn't read the book at that time...
Here's our little bit of heaven:
--- End quote ---
Heaven is right!! :o :o :o
Meanwhile, referencing this--
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 23, 2017, 06:49:22 pm ---
Ha! We figured!!!
André Aciman
@aaciman
7:18 AM - 26 Oct 2016
3 Retweets 27 Likes
https://twitter.com/aaciman?lang=en
https://twitter.com/aaciman/status/791282872879546369
I'll be giving a talk in Bordighera this weekend. Can't wait. It's my favorite spot in the planet.
--- End quote ---
read this--
Fascinating!!! 8) 8) 8)
"Call Me By Your Name, expected to be one of this year’s Oscar favorites, came together because of a botched vacation. It started in April 2005, when André Aciman’s plans to take his wife and three sons to a Mediterranean villa fell through. Frustrated, the Upper West Side novelist and City University of New York professor started writing a love story set on the Italian Riviera in the mid-1980s--"
https://nypost.com/2017/11/20/call-me-by-your-name-author-dont-be-afraid-of-same-sex-crushes/
Call Me by Your Name author:
Don’t be afraid of same-sex crushes
By Christian Gollayan
November 20, 2017 | 5:32pm
André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name, played a cameo role in the film adaptation (right).
Photo Sigrid Estrada
Call Me By Your Name, expected to be one of this year’s Oscar favorites, came together because of a botched vacation.
It started in April 2005, when André Aciman’s plans to take his wife and three sons to a Mediterranean villa fell through. Frustrated, the Upper West Side novelist and City University of New York professor started writing a love story set on the Italian Riviera in the mid-1980s.
“I was writing about a nice house with a pine alley … there was a young man in the house, basically a portrait of who I would be if I grew up in Italy,” the 66-year-old, who grew up in Egypt, tells The Post. “And then there was a young man who comes in the picture … I wasn’t planning on writing that kind of story. It just blossomed out of my own curiosity.”
Written in just three months, Call Me By Your Name is a tender coming-of-age tale about Elio, a 17-year-old genius who falls in love with Oliver, a 24-year-old graduate student who’s studying with Elio’s professor father for the summer. When it was published in 2007, critics called it a modern gay classic, albeit one written by a writer who isn’t gay. A film producer bought the rights to the story that same year.
Opening in New York Friday, the film stars Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet as the star-crossed lovers. Aciman, who has a brief cameo as Elio’s family’s friend, says he hopes the story’s same-sex romance will resonate with everyone.
“This is the biggest secret of humanity,” he says. “Everybody assumes that if they suddenly have a stirring for the same sex that it’s only them … that nobody feels this way, but we all do.”
Despite some expressing concern about the seven-year gap between the lovers, Aciman sees nothing wrong with their love.
“[Their relationship] is so consensual, I don’t even give it a second thought,” he says. “There’s clearly abuses out there, horrible abuses, but Elio is the one who asks and Oliver says, ‘We can’t do this. This is wrong.’ We’re not talking about 10-year-olds. [Elio] is almost 18. Would 18 have been a better age? I don’t know.”
Although director Luca Guadagnino made some changes when translating the book to the big screen, Aciman says he’s happy with the final product. “The best scenes in the movie were right out of the book,” he says. “How can I complain?”
He says one of his favorite moments is when Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg) tells his son the importance of being vulnerable in love: “I got a lot of mail from gay men in their 60s who basically said, ‘This book moved me because I only wish my father said that to me.’”
Although the movie ends on the Hanukkah following Elio and Oliver’s summer romance, the book closes 20 years later. Guadagnino’s talked about making a sequel with the same cast, and Aciman says he’s more than happy to collaborate.
“It’s not really a sequel as it’s the rest of the book,” Aciman says. “If Guadagnino does the next movie, he wants to capture the nuances of that love because it’s very absolute. They don’t forget, they cannot put it behind them, they have other lives, but [the love] is there and it’s not going away.”
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