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Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)
southendmd:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on October 26, 2017, 11:47:05 am ---
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John, I'm sure you recognize the setting!
Our beloved Café Sabarsky!
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: southendmd on November 21, 2017, 10:37:21 am ---John, I'm sure you recognize the setting!
Our beloved Café Sabarsky!
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Yes!!!
Especially because--!
Wanna bet Dr. Aciman chose the location to be interviewed/photographed? I think André is our kind of people! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
Aloysius J. Gleek:
There’s a lushness to the visual beauty of this place, but it’s not so perfect as to be off-putting. Quite the opposite. Despite director Luca Guadagnino’s infamous eye for meticulous detail, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s 35mm images provide a tactile quality that heightens the sensations, makes them feel almost primal. We see the wind gently rustling through the trees, or streaks of sunlight hitting Elio’s dark curls through an open bedroom window, and while it’s all subtly sensual, an inescapable tension is building underneath.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/call-me-by-your-name-2017
Call Me by Your Name
★★★★
by Christy Lemire
Monday 20 November 2017
Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name.
Luca Guadagnino’s films are all about the transformative power of nature—the way it allows our true selves to shine through and inspires us to pursue our hidden passions. From the wild, windswept hills of I Am Love to the chic swimming pool of A Bigger Splash, Guadagnino vividly portrays the outside world as almost a character in itself—driving the storyline, urging the other characters to be bold, inviting us to feel as if we, too, are a part of this intoxicating atmosphere.
Never has this been more true than in Call Me by Your Name, a lush and vibrant masterpiece about first love set amid the warm, sunny skies, gentle breezes and charming, tree-lined roads of northern Italy. Guadagnino takes his time establishing this place and the players within it. He’s patient in his pacing, and you must be, as well. But really, what’s the rush? It’s the summer of 1983, and there’s nothing to do but read, play piano, ponder classic art and pluck peaches and apricots from the abundant fruit trees.
Within this garden of sensual delights, an unexpected yet life-changing romance blossoms between two young men who initially seem completely different on the surface.
17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is once again visiting his family’s summer home with his parents: his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an esteemed professor of Greco-Roman culture, and his mother (Amira Casar), a translator and gracious hostess. Elio has the gangly body of a boy but with an intellect and a quick wit beyond his years, and the worldliness his parents have fostered within him at least allows him to affect the façade of sophistication. But beneath the bravado, a gawky and self-conscious kid sometimes still emerges. By the end of the summer, that kid will be vanquished forever.
An American doctoral student named Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives for the annual internship Elio’s father offers. Oliver is everything Elio isn’t—or at least, that’s our primary perception of him. Tall, gorgeous and supremely confident, he is the archetypal all-American hunk. But as polite as he often can be, Oliver can also breeze out of a room with a glib, “Later,” making him even more of a tantalizing mystery.
Chalamet and Hammer have just ridiculous chemistry from the get-go, even though (or perhaps because) their characters are initially prickly toward each other: testing, pushing, feeling each other out, yet constantly worrying about what the other person thinks. They flirt by trying to one-up each other with knowledge of literature or classical music, but long before they ever have any physical contact, their electric connection is unmistakable. Lazy poolside chats are fraught with tension; spontaneous bike rides into town to run errands feel like nervous first dates.
Writer James Ivory’s generous, sensitive adaptation of André Aciman’s novel reveals these characters and their ever-evolving dynamic in beautifully steady yet detailed fashion. And so when Elio and Oliver finally dare to reveal their true feelings for each other—a full hour into the film—the moment makes you hold your breath with its intimate power, and the emotions feel completely authentic and earned.
The way Elio and Oliver peel away each other’s layers has both a sweetness and a giddy thrill to it, even though they feel they must keep their romance a secret from Elio’s parents. (Elio also has a kinda-sorta girlfriend in Marzia [Esther Garrel], a thoughtful, playful French teen who’s also in town for the summer.) One of the many impressive elements of Chalamet’s beautiful, complex performance is the effortless way he transitions between speaking in English, Italian and French, depending on whom Elio is with at the time. It gives him an air of maturity that’s otherwise still in development; eventually his massive character arc feels satisfying and true.
But Oliver’s evolution is just as crucial, and Hammer finds the tricky balance between the character’s swagger and his vulnerability as he gives himself over to this exciting affair. He’s flirty but tender—the couple’s love scenes are heartbreaking and intensely erotic all at once—and even though he’s the more experienced of the two, he can’t help but diving in headlong.
And yet, the most resonant part of Call Me by Your Name may not even be the romance itself, but rather the lingering sensation that it can’t last, which Guadagnino evokes through long takes and expert use of silence. A feeling of melancholy tinges everything, from the choice of a particular shirt to the taste of a perfectly ripe peach. And oh my, that peach scene—Guadagnino was wise when he took a chance and left it in from the novel. It really works, and it’s perhaps the ultimate example of how masterfully the director manipulates and enlivens all of our senses.
There’s a lushness to the visual beauty of this place, but it’s not so perfect as to be off-putting. Quite the opposite. Despite the director’s infamous eye for meticulous detail, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s 35mm images provide a tactile quality that heightens the sensations, makes them feel almost primal. We see the wind gently rustling through the trees, or streaks of sunlight hitting Elio’s dark curls through an open bedroom window, and while it’s all subtly sensual, an inescapable tension is building underneath.
Guadagnino establishes that raw, immediate energy from the very beginning through his use of music. The piano of contemporary classical composer John Adams’ intricate, insistent “Hallelujah Junction – 1st Movement” engages us during the elegant title sequence, while Sufjan Stevens’ plaintive, synthy “Visions of Gideon” during the film’s devastating final shot ends the film on an agonizingly sad note. (You’ll want to stay all the way through the closing credits—that long, last image is so transfixing. I seriously don’t know how Chalamet pulled it off, but there is serious craft on display here.)
In between is Guadagnino’s inspired use of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” an iconic ’80s New Wave tune you’ve probably heard a million times before but will never hear the same way again. The first time he plays it, it’s at an outdoor disco where Oliver feels so moved by the bouncy, percussive beat that he can’t help but jump around to it and get lost in the music, lacking all sense of self-consciousness. Watching this towering figure just go for it on the dance floor in his Converse high-tops is a moment of pure joy, but it’s also as if a dam has broken within Elio, being so close to someone who’s feeling so free. The second time he plays it, toward the end of Oliver and Elio’s journey, it feels like the soundtrack to a time capsule as it recaptures a moment of seemingly endless emotional possibility.
They know what they’ve found has to end—we know it has to end. But a beautiful monologue from the always excellent Stuhlbarg as Elio’s warmhearted and open-minded father softens the blow somewhat. It’s a perfectly calibrated scene in a film full of them, and it’s one of a million reasons why Call Me by Your Name is far and away the best movie of the year.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/call-me-by-your-name-the-story-behind-the-most-romantic-movie-of-2017-w512269
Call Me by Your Name
The Story Behind the Most Romantic Movie of the Year
How an Italian director, a virtually unknown young actor and a Hollywood leading man turned a story of young love into an instant classic
by Tim Grierson
Wednesday 22 November 2017 1:00PM
Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name.
Luca Guadagnino is sitting in a hotel in Beverly Hills, but his mind is back in Italy. The 46-year-old director is doing press duties for Call Me by Your Name, his rapturous romance about star-crossed lovers falling for each other over one memorable, wistful summer. (It hits theaters on November 24th.) And when he's asked if he's ever had a comparably whirlwind, sun-splashed fling – one that may have helped inspire his sensual, startling love story – you get the sense that the filmmaker has momentarily left the room. He is now somewhere back in his native country, imagining the sound of lapping waves and cicadas, maybe a light breeze blowing as dusk sets. He's transported himself. Then, suddenly, he's back.
Set in gorgeous Northern Italy during the summer of 1983, Call Me by Your Name follows a talented, sensitive 17-year-old named Elio (Timothée Chalamet) who is thunderstruck by Oliver (Armie Hammer), the dashing, charismatic but slightly guarded 24-year-old who moves into his villa to study with Elio's decorated scholar father (Michael Stuhlbarg). Over a series of tranquil, humid days and nights the teenager tries resisting his slowly building feelings for this stranger, who seems too occupied with the local female beauties to notice. Eventually though, through a series of elegant glances and gentle gestures, a romance blossoms. But how long can it last considering that Oliver won't be staying more than a couple months?
It's the tyranny of limited time, and not social bigotry or the claustrophobia of the closet, that acts as the movie's chief antagonist – an irony not lost on Guadagnino, given that he spent years waiting for the right moment to bring André Aciman's 2007 novel to the screen. "When I started making movies, I was impatient," he says."I wanted to make things now. And then I was disappointed. We don't have such a thing as development in Italy as you do in Hollywood."
Initially, Guadagnino was just a consultant on the film; he was busy preparing I Am Love, his 2009 breakthrough movie starring Tilda Swinton. But the producers needed help nailing down the specifics of the period setting, however, so came on board to to offer some regional expertise. Guadagnino began working on the screenplay with Oscar-nominated James Ivory, with the expectation that the Room With a View director would be the one to make the film. During that process, the Italian filmmaker met the actors who would eventually play Elio and Oliver.
Chalamet, who had landed a small role in Interstellar and scene-stealing turns in indies such as Miss Stevens, was suggested by the actor's agent. "He said, ‘This young man, I just signed him – you should meet him because he has the qualities to be Elio,'" recalls Guadagnino. "He was so vivid. He was so ambitious in his desire for excellence. He was restless, and yet he was a boy."
But that first meeting was four years ago – back when Chalamet was 17 and, like Guadagnino, learning that films can take forever to get off the ground. "It looked like perhaps it was going to come together that summer ... and it didn't," the actor says. "And then maybe the following summer ... and it didn't." But he refused to leave a project that spoke so deeply to him. "It was complex, layered, contradictory, real and relatable – it was an awesome and accurate lens into what a young person experiences."
Hammer's wait was even longer. "I met Luca about seven years ago and had one of the best meetings I've ever had," he says. The face-to-face wasn't about any particular project – it was just to get to know one another. "I went over to his place, and we sat for hours, discussing literature and art and movies ... everything. I walked out and thought, 'I fucking nailed that.' Then I didn't hear anything from him for, like, six-and-a-half years.
"And then he calls one day," Hammer adds. "And says, ‘I have a script, and I'd love for you to be in it.'"
Timothée Chalamet, director Luca Guadagnino and Armie Hammer in
Call Me by Your Name (Photo by Peter Spears)
By 2016, Guadagnino had made his I Am Love follow-up, the sultry English-language thriller A Bigger Splash ; after the producers suggested he take the reins – at that point, who knew the material better than he did? – the Italian director decided that Call Me would be his next project. "I knew I was [also] going to make Suspiria" – his forthcoming remake of the Italian horror classic – "so it was more of the challenge of making two movies back-to-back in the same year, à la Soderbergh or Fassbinder. But then when you say yes, you get invested in the movie a hundred percent."
And though he claims he had no intention of spearheading the movie until he was asked, Call Me by Your Name feels so in tune with his two previous films (the carnal and romantic exploits of characters, sumptuous locales, unlikely lovers undone circumstance and fate) that some have billed it as the final chapter of Guadagnino's "Desire trilogy" – a moniker that the filmmaker is a little sheepish about. "They wanted to have a quote for the press book in Sundance," where the film premiered, he explains. "I was trying to decide what to say about it. And then it came to my mind that, in fact, the last three movies I made were all, in a way, different declarations of the concept of desire. That's why I came to this idea that this was the last chapter of a possible trilogy." He smiles, like he's been found out. "I was trying to articulate a way to run away from the not-nice feeling that I'm repeating myself. I'm thinking, 'Another movie about rich people lounging by the pool …'"
What helps distinguish the film are its dynamic leads, who formed a fast bond and friendship based on shared admiration for each other's work. It also doesn't hurt that Chalamet and Hammer learned to rely on one another while shooting the film's love scenes. As Hammer puts it, "I can tell you that, when you and one other person are the only naked people in a room full of non-naked people, it kind of galvanizes you a little bit."
More than a decade ago, some criticized another beautiful gay love story, Brokeback Mountain, because of its casting of straight actors, alongside a straight director. But Guadagnino finds such logic insulting to his process of finding the right performers.
"I am a gay man," he states flatly. "I'm attracted to men; I've always been. I live my life with a companion that is a man. I have admiration for the expression of a lot of LGBTQ artists today ... but I struggle with the concept of defining a person by his or her sexual identity. It makes me so uncomfortable. I just don't get it, and I don't believe that the fight for civil rights – which is so crucially important – goes hand-in-hand with indictment of someone by his or her identity."
Continuing this thought, he adds, "I do not cast my actors by their sexual identity. I cast them because I desire them. And I desire them because I can feel they mutually desire me. I think that this is a very queer emotion, and I think it's much more queer than casting a renowned gay man to play a gay character. I think it's parochial and borderline conservative to think like that."
Guadagnino brought his cast to Crema in Northern Italy to prepare for the production, shooting on location in sequence. But according to Stuhlbarg, the prep time was not spent digging into the movie's themes of fleeting love and the anxious thrill of stumbling upon a possible soul mate. "We had one day of sitting around a table reading the whole thing together, just to sort of lightly touch on everything," Stuhlbarg says. "But then we went about making it together, and we didn't talk about things."
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on August 29, 2017, 09:52:30 pm ---
https://twitter.com/pjspears/status/896692510336180224
The day it all began--the table read of CMBYN script. #victoiredubois #amiracasar @RealChalamet me #lucaguadagnino @armiehammer #michaelstuhlbarg
Peter Spears
@pjspears
Aug 13
https://twitter.com/pjspears
Producer, "Call Me By Your Name"
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Even as fans of Guadagnino's previous work, the actors can't entirely pinpoint how he produces such unhurried, everyday transcendence in Call Me. "What he allows us to see in certain [scenes], and the angles from which he allows us to see them…?" Stuhlbarg muses aloud, almost in a daze. "‘Look at this weaving path here. Look at this leaf. Look at the rain. Look at a waterfall.' All of these, in some perverse and magical language, help tell the story." The actor shakes his head. "I don't know how he did it."
"Luca's films are boundary-less," says Chalamet, who notes that Guadagnino never had him read for the part, instead trusting his instincts that the young actor would be perfect. "Anything within the composition of a shot bleeds into another part of a shot. The house is a character, the town is a character, the grass is a character..." Searching for an explanation, he adds, "There's a scene in I Am Love – Tilda Swinton is making love in the grass – and it's the most beautiful combination of nature and humanity that I've seen in a film."
Guadagnino, who's also a passionate cook, uses a culinary metaphor to explain his methods. "In food, you can make a broth, a stock," he says. "But ultimately, you can make a consommé, and the consommé is the purest essence of the stock you have made. I want to process myself into making consommé of films – take out everything that is not really necessary."
To that end, Call Me 's first cut was four hours, ultimately trimmed to a swooning two hours and ten minutes. But while the film never strains for significance, it's anchored by a stunningly compassionate and wise valedictory monologue delivered near the finale by Stuhlbarg to his son, telling him to follow his heart and not live a life characterized by regrets and what-ifs.
Stuhlbarg recalls his agent sending him the script with one comment: "Wait ‘til you get to the end." Best known for his work in the Coen brothers' A Serious Man and some key TV supporting roles (Boardwalk Empire, Fargo), the modest actor seems overwhelmed by the response his pivotal speech has inspired in critics and viewers. "It seems to have an impact on people, which is really interesting," he says. "I had no expectations. But it's provoked some wonderful conversations about parenting, generosity, compassion. How wonderful to participate in a discussion about kindness towards each other."
Call Me by Your Name concludes on a lyrical, melancholy note, though that may not be the whole story. Aciman's novel follows Elio and Oliver throughout the course of their lives, and Guadagnino has said he wants to make several sequels that continue the young men's love affair. ("I thought Luca started talking about it as a joke," Hammer says when his director's comments are brought up. "But he seems to get more and more serious about it.") Whether this tale ends being the beginning of something or the conclusion of it, the director and his actors have captured that universal, bittersweet moment when a seasonal fling begins to grow, hits full bloom and then ultimately runs its course.
"I mean, I grew up in Southern California and the Caribbean," Hammer says. "So it was just always summer. But I definitely had really intense emotional relationships when I was younger where you just think, ‘This is it – I am madly in love and will be for the rest of my life.'
"And then you grow up," he continues, "and maybe you grow apart. But don't cry because it's over – smile because it happened."
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/review-call-me-by-your-name-is-a-masterpiece.html
Call Me by Your Name
Is a Masterpiece
By David Edelstein
November 22, 2017 8:01 pm
Young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name
In Call Me by Your Name, the gifted young American actor Timothée Chalamet plays Elio, a 17-year-old who spends summers with his academic parents in their airy, rustic villa in Crema in northern Italy. In early scenes, the skinny, long-waisted Elio seems vaguely uncomfortable in his body, as if uncertain what to do with it apart from the de rigeur canoodling with teenage girls who swim with him in nearby lakes and ponds. It’s only when he stares from his bedroom window at the arrival of this year’s summer guest — a young scholar who’ll spend six weeks reading, writing, and working with the professor — that Elio seems to come out of his own head.
The 24-year-old visitor, Oliver (Armie Hammer), has an easy, almost arrogant physicality. He’s broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, absurdly handsome. But he’s hard to read. Oliver gives the shirtless Elio a quick shoulder massage and then heads off to play volleyball. Was it innocent or a come-on? Whichever, Oliver’s touch lingers. Elio sneaks into Oliver’s room and sticks his nose into a pair of discarded bathing trunks, inhaling sharply. He puts them on his head. He’s in heaven.
Call Me by Your Name takes place in summer, 1983. It has the feel of something recollected in tranquility, but the eroticism is startlingly immediate. The faithful adaptation of André Aciman’s novel is by James Ivory, but the movie has a different feel than Ivory’s own formal, somewhat stiff work. The Italian director Luca Guadagnino creates a mood of free-floating sexual longing. Oliver never wears long pants, only short shorts or swim trunks, and young men are always doffing their shirts and jumping into sparkling water or riding on bicycles along dirt roads. The flesh tones stand out against the villa’s pale whites and yellow walls — more tactile but on a continuum with the sculptures and oil paintings by men with similar longings centuries ago. Call Me by Your Name is hardly the first film set in Italy to juxtapose youth and beauty and fleeting seasons with ancient buildings and ruins. But I can’t recall such a continuum between the ephemeral and the enduring.
I also can’t remember a filmmaker who has captured the essence of midsummer this way, lazy but so vivid that every sound registers. Sound floats in through windows — of insects and birds but mostly wind. The presence of Nature can be felt in every one of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s frames. It’s reflected in the bodies of the characters. Oliver is hard for Elio — and us — to read. Is he toying with the teenager? Or is something stirring in him, too? In this atmosphere, how can something not be stirring? There’s friction in the uncertainty, heightened when Oliver dances provocatively with Elio’s kinda-sorta girlfriend. The minutes go by and then we’re into the film’s second hour with everything maddeningly —but thrillingly — undefined.
The love scenes between Elio and Oliver aren’t explicit — they only feel as if they are. The title is said in a moment of passion. It’s Oliver’s fervent desire to dissolve his self, to become one with Elio. I should point out that Armie Hammer doesn’t look 24 — more like 29, which he was during filming, and that changes the dynamic. Make of that what you will (17 was above the age of legal consent in Italy), but it’s Elio who finally pushes Oliver over the brink — who calls the question.
Michael Stuhlbarg plays Elio’s father, an anthropology professor who gazes intently at his son, seems to know what’s happening — and doesn’t interfere. He and Elio have a revelatory conversation near the end, but it’s the very last shot that stays in mind, all but dissolving the boundary between viewer and actor. Everything in Call Me by Your Name registers momentously, from the scene that definitively raises the question, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” to the ’80s dance numbers to the yearning Sufjan Stevens song over the stunning credits. Chalamet gives the performance of the year. By any name, this is a masterpiece.
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 11, 2017, 09:54:05 am ---
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/mediaviewer/rm3976289024
Mafalda, Marzia and Elio in the kitchen.
Vanda Capriolo, Esther Garrel and Timothée Chalamet
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--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 09, 2017, 11:40:33 am ---
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/mediaviewer/rm1764710400
Luncheon under the trees: Mrs Perlman, Professor Perlman, Oliver and ElioAmira Casar, Michael Stuhlbarg, Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet
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--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on October 27, 2017, 10:17:00 pm ---
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/mediaviewer/rm3925957376
Oliver's prescription for Elio's nose bleedArmie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet
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