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Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
RELEASE DATES
UK 27 October 2017
Ireland 27 October 2017
USA 24 November 2017 (New York and Los Angeles)*
Canada 8 December 2017
Thailand 14 December 2017 (limited)
Sweden 22 December 2017
Australia 26 December 2017
France 17 January 2018
Brazil 18 January 2018
Poland 26 January 2018
Italy 1 February 2018 (Premiere?)
Greece 8 February 2018
Germany 1 March 2018
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5726616/releaseinfo?linkId=43379176
USA*
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 16, 2017, 09:38:36 pm ---
Posted by ewpunk on November 16th, 2017
https://laterpeaches.tumblr.com/post/167565803178/chalametdaily-usa-release-dates-for-cmbyn
https://chalametdaily.tumblr.com/post/167565474444/usa-release-dates-for-cmbyn
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Aloysius J. Gleek:
Oliver and Elio lay back in the grass together, and Elio says, “I love this, Oliver,” and Oliver says, “What?” and Elio says, “Everything.” And then Oliver takes a pause before saying, “Us, you mean?”
https://nylon.com/articles/redefining-masculinity-armie-hammer-call-me-by-your-name
Redefining Masculinity: On Armie Hammer in
Call Me by Your Name
It’s not a question of if this film will make you cry, but when and how much
by DAN CALLAHAN
Wednesday 22 November 2017
Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name.
There is a “morning after” scene in the new film Call Me by Your Name that follows an extremely elaborate courtship between Elio, played by Timothée Chalamet, and Oliver, played by Armie Hammer. (There won’t be many plot spoilers in this article as much as what could be termed “emotional spoilers,” so just tread carefully until you see the movie.) Director Luca Guadagnino does not show us much of what they do in bed together—because that’s private and that’s for them and we wouldn’t be able to get anything from it just as observers. But we do get a sense of what they might have done sexually based on their behavior the next morning.
Elio is sitting on the bed, and he glances back at Oliver with what looks like slight contempt. It’s the sort of macho look that broadcasts, “Okay, I’ve had you, so now what?” Guadagnino cuts to Oliver, whose face is totally open and totally vulnerable. Oliver knows that Elio has pulled away from him a bit, and this bewilders and saddens him. He tries to smile slightly, and that slight smile is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen in a movie.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Hammer revealed that Guadagnino showed him a few minutes of Debra Winger in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (1990) to inspire him for this scene, and that was clearly an ideal choice. When I saw this close-up of Hammer’s Oliver trying to smile, I wondered how both director and actor had achieved this look of stirringly non-gendered pain and confusion. To get the very consciously masculine Hammer to show something soft and scared and broken, Guadagnino showed his actor some footage of Winger—a very macho actress—where she looked confused and hurt.
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 27, 2017, 08:50:00 pm ---
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André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name is told from the point of view of Elio, a man who is remembering a summer love affair in his youth. Oliver, the object of his desire, is staying with Elio and his parents in Italy in order to assist Elio’s father. Since it is written in the first person, we get to read about Elio’s obsessive thoughts and feelings in detail, and Oliver necessarily remains somewhat opaque. But in Guadagnino’s film version of the novel—which was scripted by James Ivory and is set in 1983—there is a balance between the points of view of Elio and Oliver, and this balance is achieved by the extraordinarily sensitive way that Guadagnino films the faces and body language of his two lead actors.
When we first see Hammer’s Oliver, he is getting out of a car and he makes a joke about his height (Hammer himself is six foot five). He walks stiffly, and his voice has the exaggerated bass male aggressiveness of Jon Hamm’s Don Draper on Mad Men. But when Oliver flops himself down on his stomach on Elio’s bed, his body looks very open and submissive, and this establishes him visually as Elio’s object of desire. Oliver calls Elio “man” and “buddy” and says, “Later” in a very male 1983 way that sounds unfriendly because it is meant to ward off scrutiny. Sometimes Hammer sounds like a young Robert Redford when Oliver wants to indicate, “I’m masculine and I’m also cerebral,” but this is just a vocal mask beneath another vocal mask.
The feelings between Oliver and Elio start with a kind of surface hostility, and Oliver makes a huge mistake when he tries to signal his interest in Elio with a touch on the shoulder that turns into a brief back rub. Elio recoils from this clumsy male touch. In a courtship, one false or blunt move can delay or even destroy a romantic feeling, and the same could be said for a movie that deals with a courtship. Guadagnino and his two lead actors walk a tightrope with no net here. If they put one foot wrong, the whole movie won’t work, and this generates suspense on multiple levels.
The sun and sensuality of an Italian summer get Oliver and Elio back on track. Oliver allows himself to be dominated by Elio in conversation, and this is followed by a dance scene that has already become famous. Girls ogle Oliver on the dance floor as he grooves to “Lady, Lady, Lady,” a song from the Flashdance soundtrack. (Growing up in the 1980s, my parents would often put the Flashdance soundtrack on in the car, and I would get excruciatingly embarrassed when “Lady, Lady, Lady,” came on because the lyrics are so intimate and sexual.) 1980s pop music is an apt auditory setting for this story because so much of that music is so openly emotional and extravagant.
The music changes to the Psychedelic Furs’ song “Love My Way,” and Hammer’s Oliver really lets himself go to it (this excerpted dance sequence has rightly delighted the internet). But Elio looks at Oliver’s dancing with hooded eyes, like a poker player, which reveals his crafty character. He maybe does fall more in love with Oliver when watching him dance to this song, but he would never reveal that on his face. In a fast cut, Elio is suddenly on the dance floor with Oliver, and he does “sexy” moves with his shoulders that look very contained next to Oliver’s goofy abandon. This is the perfect image of both who they are and who they will be to each other.
After the dance, there is a brief moment where Oliver still walks like the Big Man on Campus, but then he lets go and walks much more loosely and almost girlishly. Oliver is this big butch guy whose masculinity is revealed as very much a performance that he is tired of. He would much rather be in flux, gender-wise, and he starts to be as he and Elio very slowly reveal their feelings for each other. About 45 minutes into the movie, there is a key moment where Oliver does his “macho” voice for Elio, and Elio mocks it to his face. Elio reduces this macho voice to grunting nonsense noises, and this seems to free Oliver from his vocal prison. That’s what someone who loves you can do.
In a superbly staged scene where they finally verbally indicate their romantic emotions for each other, Oliver and Elio circle a World War I memorial and behave as if they are underground Resistance fighters who are planning a siege that might get them killed. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Oliver asks. The emotional danger here is very intense. They are going to need to hide their love, but any wise person knows that to hide your love is really best; if you flaunt your love for another person, the gods might get angry. The stakes could not be higher here, and romantic love thrives on that, which is maybe why so many of our best contemporary film love stories, like Carol (2015) and Moonlight (2016), are between members of the same sex.
Oliver and Elio lay back in the grass together, and Elio says, “I love this, Oliver,” and Oliver says, “What?” and Elio says, “Everything.” And then Oliver takes a pause before saying, “Us, you mean?” The way that Hammer says the line, “Us, you mean?” couldn’t be more furtive or more exciting. Elio kisses Oliver and tries to take the lead physically, but Oliver stops him. There is their age difference to consider (Elio is 17 and Oliver is 24), but Oliver seems mainly just scared to do this openly with a guy. He treats Elio as ethically as possible and makes him wait. After Elio gets a bloody nose, Oliver gives him a secret foot massage, and then he kisses Elio’s foot, and the look on Hammer’s face here can only be described as “ardent.”
This is courtly love between two very smart guys, and when they finally get together at midnight one night to make love, I felt like I shouldn’t be watching what was happening between them; that’s how intimate this scene is. Afterward, Oliver says, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” which is like the moment in Wuthering Heights when Cathy cries, “I am Heathcliff!” They both are fully aware that their romance is finite and doesn’t have long to last.
Elio plays around with a peach and idly ejaculates into it, which is filmed in a very slowed-down, realistic way. Oliver makes another miscalculation when he grabs the peach and tries to eat it. This is the only moment after they sleep together where Oliver makes the mistake of treating Elio like someone who is more experienced. Elio starts to cry with embarrassment, and Oliver has to comfort him. They aren’t one person anymore but two people, and of course sometimes two people aren’t on the same track with each other.
In the novel, Oliver does eat the peach, but his almost eating it in the film works very well because it reveals something about the characters. Lest it should just seem like a gross sexual fetish, here is the extremely romantic way that Elio describes Oliver’s thinking in the book: “I believe with every cell in my body that every cell in yours must not, must never, die, and if it does have to die, let it die inside my body.” (Lines like this are given an, “Oh my God” reading in Hammer’s very urgent audio recording of Aciman’s novel, where the movie Oliver touchingly speaks for Elio.)
Elio’s parents Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Annella (Amira Casar) seem to know what is happening with their son and Oliver, but they tactfully do not meddle. Annella looks enigmatic at first as she watches over Elio and smokes her cigarettes, for she has the same hooded eyes as Elio. On a second viewing of this movie, it became clear to me that Annella not only knows what is happening but that she understands that Oliver is more in love with her son than Elio is with him. The way that Casar gets this across is the ultimate in worldliness and sophistication, in the best possible sense.
It is Annella’s idea that Elio and Oliver should go away together for one more fling, and there are beautiful “time is running out” moments between them where Oliver seems to be memorizing every moment he has left with Elio. All of Oliver’s senses have come alive, and this is shown as very sweet, sexy, and even gently comic. “This!” Oliver cries ecstatically, drunkenly, with emphasis, on his last night with Elio. “This! You!” Call Me by Your Name is a great love story, and it is also a story about the way that Guadagnino’s camera loves and brings out Hammer as an actor who can express joy or inner turmoil with a glance.
The last scenes in Call Me by Your Name are so poignant that even the most hardboiled spectator will be likely to cry. (It’s not if you will cry at Call Me by Your Name, but more like when you will cry and how often.) Guadagnino ends his film with a phone call between Elio and Oliver. It is winter now, and Oliver says he is going to get married. The last shot is a long close-up of Elio’s face as he stares into the fire and the end credits roll. He is destroyed, and tears come out of his eyes, but he lets one of them slide into his mouth, like Barbara Stanwyck at the end of Stella Dallas (1937), and this indicates that he is finding a kind of enjoyment in his pain. Toward the end of this close-up, Elio starts to look very angry, and that’s what the film fades to black on.
Aciman is married to a woman, and he doesn’t believe in labeling sexuality. Guadagnino is gay. Elio and Oliver both seem bisexual, but Elio is likely going to move more toward women as he gets older, while Oliver is probably going to move toward men when he feels like he can. They won’t ever forget what they felt for each other, and maybe you could say that their lives will be ruined because of that.
But maybe what Call Me by Your Name (both novel and film) is saying is that you are lucky if you can have your life ruined by a love affair, if you can feel something with that much intensity. Something of that intensity wasn’t meant to last. But that close-up of Hammer’s face where Oliver tries to smile expresses the grief over that realization as profoundly as any human facial expression I’ve ever seen.
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 03, 2017, 10:07:51 pm ---
http://armie-hammer.com/photos/thumbnails.php?album=269
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23CallMeByYourName%2C
https://allywantstofly.tumblr.com/post/164978769932/whatever-happens-between-us-elio-i-just-want
https://eliopearlmans.tumblr.com/
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Aloysius J. Gleek:
Mr. Guadagnino is very good at catching the indolent drift of long summer days, with their sleepiness and bared limbs. Everyone seems to move in slow motion at the villa, except perhaps the family’s hard-working maid. This languor fits the tempo of Elio and Oliver’s relationship, which evolves over meals, drowsy idylls, a little work and a spontaneous piano recital that becomes an overture to seduction. A gifted musician, Elio easily moves from piano to guitar (much as his family shifts from speaking Italian to French to English), talent that makes him seem at one with the villa’s miles of bookshelves, its velvet sofas, scattered Oriental rugs and tastefully arranged antiques.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/movies/call-me-by-your-name-review-armie-hammer.html
NYT Critic’s Pick
A Boy’s Own Desire in
Call Me by Your Name
by MANOHLA DARGIS
NOV. 22, 2017
Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name
You don’t just watch Luca Guadagnino’s movies, you swoon into them. His best-known titles, “I Am Love” and “A Bigger Splash,” feature beautiful people with impeccable taste experiencing haute-bourgeois life intensely. Passion and drama upend those lives, but what’s most striking about these movies is their extraordinary palpable quality. In Mr. Guadagnino’s work, passion and drama are expressed in words, deeds and surging music but also in the vibrant, visceral textures that envelop his characters — the cool marble, succulent fruit, shadow and light, sheens of sweat. These are movies that turn your gaze into near-touch, inviting you to see and almost caress their sun-warmed bodies.
Mr. Guadagnino’s latest, “Call Me by Your Name,” is another ravishment of the senses, though this time there’s a strong narrative tethering all the churning feelings and sensuous surfaces. Like the 2007 novel by André Aciman on which it’s based, the story turns on an affair between Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a coltish 17-year-old American-Italian, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), an American in his 20s. Elio lives with his father (a tremendous Michael Stuhlbarg) and mother (Amira Casar) in a villa in northern Italy. Each summer the father, a professor of Greco-Roman culture, invites a student to work with him and stay with his family; this year it’s Oliver who moves in.
Elio and Oliver’s affair begins slowly with each circling the other at a distance, conveying the kind of nonchalance that’s a shield for interest. Oliver proves far better at this part of the game; he knows more than to look too long and too hard. Elio’s furtive, ducking glances, by contrast, tend to linger, hovering in the air like questions. He’s increasingly curious about this new guest, but soon inexplicably (to Elio, at least) irked by him as well, leading Elio to complain to his parents about Oliver’s standard signoff (“later”). But when Elio scribbles a private rebuke in a notebook, chastising himself for responding harshly toward Oliver, it’s as if he were writing an apologetic love letter.
Mr. Guadagnino is very good at catching the indolent drift of long summer days, with their sleepiness and bared limbs. Everyone seems to move in slow motion at the villa, except perhaps the family’s hard-working maid. This languor fits the tempo of Elio and Oliver’s relationship, which evolves over meals, drowsy idylls, a little work and a spontaneous piano recital that becomes an overture to seduction. A gifted musician, Elio easily moves from piano to guitar (much as his family shifts from speaking Italian to French to English), talent that makes him seem at one with the villa’s miles of bookshelves, its velvet sofas, scattered Oriental rugs and tastefully arranged antiques.
It’s an alluring milieu — charming, civilized and perfectly, if a shade too flawlessly, arranged. Here, even a busy breakfast table and the fruit on a tree can seem art directed. Mr. Guadagnino almost can’t help making everything look intoxicating, yet he also makes you believe in this family’s reality. The grand piano isn’t for show and neither are the books or the open affection and respect with which Elio and his parents treat one another. (The movie reminds you how rarely characters read for pleasure, much less listen to classical music.) “Call Me by Your Name” is set in 1983, so no one is staring into a smartphone. And the time frame means that AIDS doesn’t figure in the story, though there’s a suggestion that the closet does.
A spontaneous piano recital: Mr. Hammer, left, and Mr. Chalamet.
The story primarily unfolds through Elio’s point of view. The restless camera tags alongside him, showing you what he sees, his erotic reveries and yearning. And it’s Elio who initiates the affair, at least overtly, though Oliver later admits to playing his part in what the story frames as a mutual seduction. Mr. Guadagnino avoids directly engaging the difference in Elio and Oliver’s ages, which might have forced him to explore the underside of his sumptuous surfaces to greater, messier effect. Instead, Mr. Guadagnino leans on beauty, as when Elio’s father poetically speaks to an increasingly agitated Oliver about the “ageless ambiguity” of some male statues (“as if they’re daring you to desire them”).
Written by James Ivory (the director of films like “Maurice”), “Call Me by Your Name” progresses through evasions and encounters, with Elio advancing, Oliver receding and their circling narrowing. The two don’t (can’t, won’t) always say what they mean. So Mr. Guadagnino speaks for them by eroticizing their world, making desire visible in the luxuriousness of the setting, in the green enveloping the villa, the gushing waters of a pool and the graceful lines of male statues. When Oliver hungrily eats a soft-boiled egg, cracking the shell and causing the yolk to messily spurt, Mr. Guadagnino’s lyricism slides into comedy; it’s hard to know just how self-mocking the moment is meant to be.
Even so, the lyricism seduces as does fragile, ecstatic Elio. “Call Me by Your Name” is less a coming-of-age story, a tale of innocence and loss, than one about coming into sensibility. In that way, it is about the creation of a new man who, the story suggests, is liberated by pleasure that doesn’t necessarily establish sexual identity. It’s important that Elio and Oliver have relationships with women, though for seemingly different reasons: the overheated Elio sleeps with a girlfriend (Esther Garrel), while Oliver carries on a more performative affair with a local (Victoire Du Bois). The women are not treated with much kindness, but these affairs further complicate the movie’s vision of pleasure’s fluidity.
There are moments when Mr. Guadagnino’s visual choices seem unintentionally in competition with the quieter, intricate emotions that his actors put across so movingly. He can be discreet to the point of coyness (bodies sweat but don’t necessarily grunt), but it is finally the insistent delicacy and depth of emotion that makes these characters so heart-skippingly tender. The charismatic Mr. Chalamet, Mr. Hammer and Mr. Stuhlbarg — whose brilliant delivery of a tricky speech pierces the heart and, crucially, the movie’s lustrous patina — transform beauty into feeling. In one alive, vulnerable and life-altering summer, Elio’s desire finds its purpose. He loves, and in loving, he becomes.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Violante Visconti conceptually married the Perlmans’ worldliness with the villa’s nostalgic past to attain the eclectic, lived-in feel of a deeply loved home. “[Much] of the furniture belonged to my father,” she says. “That made it cozy and personal. The Perlmans are open-minded. They love books, music, history. … Their house is easygoing and non-structured, with flowers from the garden, furniture from their travels. It was there for generations. The Perlmans inherited it and added their lives to it. I wanted to give it the sense of time passing by.”
http://variety.com/2017/artisans/production/call-me-by-your-name-costumes-decor-1202621005/
Luca Guadagnino Relied on a Pair of Longtime Friends for
Call Me by Your Name
Decor and Costumes.
by Tomris Laffly
NOVEMBER 23, 2017 10:15AM PT
Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name
Two longtime friends of director Luca Guadagnino added their personal touch to “Call Me by Your Name,” his sensual summer romance from Sony Pictures Classics that’s set in northern Italy in 1983.
An interior decorator by trade, first-time set decorator Violante Visconti (Luchino Visconti’s grandniece) dressed the 17th-century villa where young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) lives with his scholarly parents, the Perlmans (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) and falls for the visiting American intern Oliver (Armie Hammer).
Fashion designer and repeat Guadagnino collaborator Giulia Piersanti created the film’s understated costumes.
Visconti conceptually married the Perlmans’ worldliness with the villa’s nostalgic past to attain the eclectic, lived-in feel of a deeply loved home. “[Much] of the furniture belonged to my father,” she says. “That made it cozy and personal. The Perlmans are open-minded. They love books, music, history. … Their house is easygoing and non-structured, with flowers from the garden, furniture from their travels. It was there for generations. The Perlmans inherited it and added their lives to it. I wanted to give it the sense of time passing by.”
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 09, 2017, 01:19:25 pm ---
Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) enters the Villa Albergoni vestibule.
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Most of the dishes and ’50s glassware belonged to Visconti’s parents and to Guadagnino. Maps, mirrors and paintings with Asian influences primarily came from Piva, an antiques store in Milan.
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 09, 2017, 01:19:25 pm ---
The library of Villa Albergoni, site of the Perlman family home.
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Visconti is especially fond of the pinkish couch in the library, a central piece in a number of scenes, calling it “a shabby-chic sofa in a place full of life and memories.” She recalls her collaboration with Samuel Deshors, the film’s production designer, who conceptualized many exteriors. “We obviously couldn’t have a normal swimming pool in this sort of garden,” she says. “[Samuel] had the clever idea of turning an animal watering trough into a pool.”
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 21, 2017, 01:47:47 am ---
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For the costumes, Piersanti avoided going overboard. “Very period-y clothes would have done a disservice to the film,” she says. “The key was giving a sense of insouciant adolescent sensuality, summer heat and sexual awakening. I wanted to hint at a nostalgic, suspended period.”
As a result, Piersanti stuck with a few key pieces for each character. She pulled from her own memories of Italian summers, represented in Eric Rohmer’s “Pauline at the Beach,” “A Summer’s Tale” and “A Tale of Springtime.” For the Perlmans, she drew inspiration from her parents’ photo albums.
Mrs. Perlman’s casually chic wardrobe, consisting of mustard and army green shirts and silk bourette shorts, was custom-made based on vintage Armani pieces. Aiming to differentiate Oliver’s looks from everyone else’s, Piersanti chose big Ralph Lauren shirts, short shorts and high tops for him. “I was looking at some of Bruce Weber’s earliest photographs, of the ’80s sexy, healthy American man,” she says.
For Elio, who wears plenty of Lacoste throughout, Piersanti wanted to emphasize his evolved, confident style in the final scene with a bold shirt that came from a vintage shop in Milan. But she is mostly keen on Elio’s burgundy polo shirt and Fido Dido T-shirt. “They are from my husband’s closet,” she reveals. “I love that they will stay forever on film.”
Also see:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 09, 2017, 04:37:28 pm ---
http://www.anothermag.com/design-living/10319/a-closer-look-at-the-sets-of-new-film-call-me-by-your-name
http://laterpeaches.tumblr.com/post/167012705693/a-closer-look-at-the-sets-of-new-film-call-me-by
More Interior Images from the the Villa Albergoni by Photography by Giulio Ghirardi
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And see:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 21, 2017, 04:40:50 pm ---
https://it.luxuryestate.com/italia/lombardia/cremona
https://it.luxuryestate.com/p16410421-villa-in-vendita-moscazzano
VILLA A MOSCAZZANO, CREMONA
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And ESPECIALLY see:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 09, 2017, 01:19:25 pm ---
The ancient villa in North Italy almost outshines Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer.
http://www.elledecor.com/celebrity-style/celebrity-homes/a13120998/call-me-by-your-name-movie-set/
TOUR THE 17TH-CENTURY ITALIAN VILLA
IN DIRECTOR LUCA GUADAGNINO’S
'CALL ME BY YOUR NAME'
The Lombardian Villa Albergoni propels — and rivals — the intimacy of
Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in one of this year's richest films.
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Aloysius J. Gleek:
The screenplay of “Call Me by Your Name,” adapted from André Aciman’s novel of the same title, is by James Ivory. He has done a remarkable job, paring away pasts and futures, and leaving us with an overwhelming surge of now. On the page, events are recounted, in the first person, by an older Elio, gazing backward, but Timothée Chalamet’s Elio lacks the gift of hindsight. In any case, why is it a gift? Who wouldn’t prefer to be in the thick of love? The book is a mature and thoughtful vintage; in the film, we’re still picking the grapes.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/call-me-by-your-name-an-erotic-triumph
The Current Cinema
Call Me by Your Name, An Erotic Triumph
Luca Guadagnino’s latest film is emotionally acute and overwhelmingly sensual.
By Anthony Lane December 4, 2017 Issue
Luca Guadagnino’s sensuous film evokes the transformations of young love. Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli
The new film by Luca Guadagnino, “Call Me by Your Name,” begins in the summer of 1983, in a place so enchanted, with its bright green gardens, that it belongs in a fairy tale. The location, the opening credits tell us, is “Somewhere in Northern Italy.” Such vagueness is deliberate: the point of a paradise is that it could exist anywhere but that, once you reach the place, it brims with details so precise in their intensity that you never forget them. Thus it is that a young American named Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives, dopey with jet lag, at the house of Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his Italian wife, Annella (Amira Casar), whose custom is to spend their summers there and also to return for Hanukkah. (Like them, Oliver is Jewish; a closeup shows a Star of David hanging from a chain around his neck.) The Professor, an American expert in classical archeology, requires an annual assistant, and Oliver is this year’s choice. “We’ll have to put up with him for six long weeks,” Annella says, with a sigh. Not long enough, as it turns out. You can pack a whole lifetime into six weeks.
The first words of the film are “The usurper.” They are uttered by the Perlmans’ only child—their son, Elio (Timothée Chalamet), who is seventeen. He stands at an upstairs window with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel) and watches Oliver below, fearful that the American may break the reigning peace. The Professor is more welcoming, and he proposes a kind of free trade, both spatial and emotional, that will resound throughout. “Our home is your home,” he says to Oliver. “My room is your room,” Elio adds, a few seconds later, like an echo. He has moved into the adjoining room for the duration of Oliver’s stay, and they must share a bathroom. The sharing will deepen, from handshakes to confidences, and from cigarettes to kisses and other mouthly charms, concluding in the most profound exchange of all, whispered from a few inches’ distance and proclaimed in the title of the movie.
“Call Me by Your Name” is, among other things, an exercise in polyglottery, and Elio chats to his parents and friends in an easy blend of English, French, and Italian, sometimes sliding between tongues in the course of a single conversation. (Who would guess that a household, no less than a city, can be a melting pot?) His father and Oliver enjoy a clash of wits about the twisted root of the word “apricot,” tracing it through Arabic, Latin, and Greek, and mentioning that one branch leads to the word “precocious”—a nod to Elio, who listens to them with half a smile. He is a prodigy, voraciously bookish, who plays Bach al fresco on the guitar and then inside on the piano, in the manner of Liszt and of Busoni, with Oliver standing in the background, contrapposto, with the elegant tilt of a statue, drinking in the sound and the skill. “Is there anything you don’t know?” he asks, after Elio has told him about an obscure, bloody battle of the First World War.
Prodigies can be a pain, onscreen and off, and Elio—fevered with boyish uncertainties and thrills, though no longer a boy, and already rich in adult accomplishments, yet barely a man—should be an impossible role. Somehow, as if by magic, Chalamet makes it work, and you can’t imagine how the film could breathe without him. His expression is sharp and inquisitive, but cream-pale and woundable, too, and saved from solemnity by the grace of good humor; when Oliver says that he has to take care of some business, Elio retorts by impersonating him to his face. Chalamet is quite something, but Hammer is a match for him, as he needs to be, if the characters’ passions are to be believed. Elio is taken aback, at the start, by Oliver’s swagger—the hesitant youth, steeped in Europe, confronted with can-do American chops. Hammer doesn’t strut, but his every action, be it dismounting a bicycle, draining a glass of juice (apricot, of course), slinging a backpack over his shoulder, rolling sideways into a pool, or demolishing a boiled egg at breakfast until it’s a welter of spilled yolk suggests a person almost aggressively at home in his own body, and thus in the larger world. Hence the abrupt note that he sends to Elio: “Grow up. See you at midnight.”
You could, I suppose, regard Oliver as the incarnation of soft power. Certainly, his handsomeness is so extreme that the camera tends to be angled up at him, as if at one of the ancient bronze deities over which the Professor enthuses. When Oliver wades in a cold stream one glorious day, you stare at him and think, My God, he is a god. And yet, as he and Elio lounge on sun-warmed grass, it’s Oliver who seems unmanned, and it’s Elio who lays a purposeful hand directly on Oliver’s crotch. Now one, now the other appears the more carnally confident of the two. They take a while to find parity and poise, but, once they do, they are inextricable, rendered equal by ardor; the first shot of them, at dawn, after they sleep together, is of limbs so entangled that we can’t tell whose are whose. As for their parting, it is wordless. They look at one another and just nod, as if to say, Yes, that was right. That was how it is meant to be.
The screenplay of “Call Me by Your Name,” adapted from André Aciman’s novel of the same title, is by James Ivory. He has done a remarkable job, paring away pasts and futures, and leaving us with an overwhelming surge of now. On the page, events are recounted, in the first person, by an older Elio, gazing backward, but Chalamet’s Elio lacks the gift of hindsight. In any case, why is it a gift? Who wouldn’t prefer to be in the thick of love? The book is a mature and thoughtful vintage; in the film, we’re still picking the grapes.
It’s tempting to speculate how Ivory, who, as the director of “A Room with a View” (1985) and of “Maurice” (1987), showed his mastery of Italian settings and of same-sex romance, might have fared at the helm of the new film. The rhythm, I suspect, would have been more languorous, as if the weather had seeped into people’s lazy bones, whereas Guadagnino, an instinctive modernist, is more incisive. He and his longtime editor, Walter Fasano, keep cutting short the transports of delight; the lovers pedal away from us, on bikes, to the lovely strains of Ravel’s “Mother Goose Suite,” only for the scene to hit the brakes. “Call Me by Your Name” is suffused with heat, and piled high with fine food, but it isn’t a nice movie; you see it not to unwind but to be wound up—to be unrelaxed by the force with which rapture strikes. There is even a gratifying cameo by a peach, which proves useful in an erotic emergency, and merits an Academy Award for Best Supporting Fruit.
The film’s release could not be more propitious. So assailed are we by reports of harmful pleasures, and of the coercive male will being imposed through lust, that it comes as a relief to be reminded, in such style, of consensual joy. “I don’t want either of us to pay for this,” Oliver says. By falling for each other, he and Elio tumble not into error, still less into sin, but into a sort of delirious concord, which may explain why Elio’s parents, far from disapproving, bestow their tacit blessing on the pact. More unusual still is that the movie steers away from the politics of sexuality. Elio makes love to Marzia, on a dusty mattress, in a loft like an old dovecote, only hours before he meets with Oliver at midnight, but you don’t think, Oh, Elio’s having straight sex, followed by gay sex, and therefore we must rank him as bi-curious. Rather, you are curious about him and his paramours as individuals—these particular bodies, with these hungry souls, at these ravening moments in their lives. Desire is passed around the movie like a dish, and the characters are invited to help themselves, each to his or her own taste. Maybe a true love story (and when did you last see one of those?) has no time for types.
Not that anything endures. Late in the film, the Professor sits with his son on a couch, smokes, and talks of what has occurred. We expect condescension, instead of which we hear a confession. “I envy you,” he tells Elio, adding, “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty.” He once came near, he admits, to having what Elio and Oliver had, but something stood in the way, and he advises his child to seize the day, including the pain that the day brings, while he is still young: “Before you know it, your heart is worn out.” Much of this long speech is taken from Aciman’s novel, but Stuhlbarg delivers it beautifully, with great humility, tapping his cigarette. After which, it seems only natural that so rich a movie should close with somebody weeping, beside a winter fire. The shot lasts for minutes, as did the final shot of Michael Haneke’s “Hidden” (2005), but Haneke wanted to stoke our paranoia and our dread, while Guadagnino wants us to reflect, at our leisure, on love: on what a feast it can be, on how it turns with the seasons, and on why it ends in tears. ♦
This article will be published in its print form in the December 4, 2017, issue.
Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.” newyorker.com.
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