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Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__/status/904271579848130560 3 Sep 2017 https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__/status/936925430761664512 2 Dec 2017
https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__
CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANART by @mellowbeat__
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on December 03, 2017, 10:28:34 pm ---
Yet the slight murkiness of Oliver’s motivations becomes part of the film’s power. He remains a spiritual stranger — to us, to Elio, and to himself. Call Me by Your Name, in presenting a “well-adjusted” gay character who projects no self-loathing yet is unwilling to fully be himself, creates an expressionist vision of what the closet is: not simply a prison, but a precise and complex state of being that, for a long time, defined the way that a lot of people lived — and still does. The movie doesn’t attack the closet; it humanizes the closet.
The critique, though, is implicit. For who, in the end, wants to live that way? Oliver, sensual and liberated yet finally compartmentalized, is an archangel of erotic mystery who swoops down to tap Elio on the shoulder and bring him to life. And though Oliver comes on like the fierce, wise, and all-knowing one, it’s really Elio, in his confusion, who emerges as the more enlightened character. Oliver is content to suppress his life force — that’s the only way that makes sense to him — but Elio represents the dawn of a new way. That fire he’s staring into during the film’s extraordinary final shot isn’t simply the memory of the passion he shared with Oliver. It’s the life of passion that awaits him in the future. It’s the burn of a desire that’s untrapped.
http://variety.com/2017/film/columns/call-me-by-your-name-a-meditation-on-the-closet-1202629039/
Call Me by Your Name
A Love Story — and a Meditation on the Closet.
by Owen Gleiberman
@OwenGleiberman
DECEMBER 3, 2017 10:12AM PT
--- End quote ---
https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__/status/936925430761664512 2 Dec 2017 https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__/status/904271579848130560 3 Sep 2017
https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__
CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANART by @mellowbeat__
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
Portugal 18 January 2018
Italy 25 January 2018
Finland 26 January 2018
Norway 26 January 2018
Poland 26 January 2018
Denmark 1 February 2018
Greece 8 February 2018
Spain 16 February 2018
France 28 February 2018
Hong Kong 1 March 2018
Germany 1 March 2018
Switzerland 1 March 2018 (German Speaking Region)
Czechia 22 March 2018
Japan April 2018
S. Korea Spring 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
--- End quote ---
Jeff Wrangler:
Sorry, thread's too long for me to find it efficiently.
Was it here that I saw something about a bad review from The New Yorker?
It must have been on line because I would say Anthony Lane's review in the December 4 "hard copy" is generally favorable.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on December 07, 2017, 11:17:27 pm ---Sorry, thread's too long for me to find it efficiently.
Was it here that I saw something about a bad review from The New Yorker?
It must have been on line because I would say Anthony Lane's review in the December 4 "hard copy" is generally favorable.
--- End quote ---
Here Jeff, is first:
the BAD REVIEW by Richard Brody (his blog online, Nov. 28 2017, also posted in the Bettermost Culture Tent New Yorker thread)
immediately followed below by:
the GOOD REVIEW by Anthony Lane (New Yorker December 4 Issue, also posted in this thread and also in the Bettermost Culture Tent New Yorker thread):
Richard Brody
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 28, 2017, 07:55:01 pm ---
"All that’s missing is the Web site offering Elio-and-Oliver tours through the Italian countryside, with a stopover at the Perlman villa. Instead of gestural or pictorial evocations of intimacy, the performers act out the script’s emotions with a bland literalness that—due to the mechanistic yet vague direction—is often laughable, as in the case of the pseudo-James Dean-like grimacing that Luca Guadagnino coaxes from Timothée Chalamet."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/call-me-by-your-name-an-erotic-triumph
Richard Brody
The Empty, Sanitized Intimacy of
Call Me by Your Name
By Richard Brody November 28, 2017 4:00PM
In “Call Me by Your Name,” starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, the director Luca Guadagnino displays no real interest
in the characters, only in the story. Photograph by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom / Sony Pictures Classics
Luca Guadagnino’s new film, “Call Me by Your Name,” may be progressive in its appropriately admiring depiction of a loving and erotic relationship between two young men, but its storytelling is backward. It is well known, and therefore no spoiler to say, that it’s a story, set in 1983, about a summer fling between a graduate student named Oliver (Armie Hammer), who’s in his mid-twenties, and Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the seventeen-year-old son of the professor with whom Oliver is working and at whose lavish estate in northern Italy he’s staying. Half a year after their brief relationship, Oliver and Elio speak, seemingly for the first time in many months. Elio affirms that his parents were aware of the relationship and offered their approval, to which Oliver responds, “You’re so lucky; my father would have carted me off to a correctional facility.” And that’s the premise of the film: in order to have anything like a happy adolescence and avoid the sexual repression and frustration that seem to be the common lot, it’s essential to pick the right parents. The movie is about, to put it plainly, being raised right.
If Guadagnino had any real interest in his characters, what Elio and Oliver say about their parents near the end of the movie would have been among the many confidences that they share throughout. Long before the two become lovers, they’re friends—somewhat wary friends, who try to express their desire but, in the meantime, spend lots of time together eating meals and taking strolls, on bike rides and errands—and the story is inconceivable without the conversation that they’d have had as their relationship developed. And yet, as the movie is made, what they actually say to each other is hardly seen or heard.
They’re both intellectuals. Oliver is an archeologist and a classicist with formidable philological skills and philosophical training; he reads Stendhal for fun, Heraclitus for work, and writes about Heidegger. Elio, who’s trilingual (in English, French, and Italian) is a music prodigy who transcribes by ear music by Schoenberg and improvises, at the piano, a Liszt-like arrangement of a piece by Bach and a Busoni-like arrangement of the Liszt-like arrangement, and he’s literature-smitten as well. But for Guadagnino it’s enough for both of them to post their intellectual bona fides on the screen like diplomas. The script (written by James Ivory) treats their intelligence like a club membership, their learning like membership cards, their intellectualism like a password—and, above all, their experience like baggage that’s checked at the door.
What their romantic lives have been like prior to their meeting, they never say. Is Oliver is the first man with whom Elio has had an intimate relationship? Has Elio been able to acknowledge, even to himself, his attraction to other men, or is the awakening of desire for a male a new experience for him? What about for Oliver? Though Elio and Oliver are also involved with women in the course of the summer, they don’t ever discuss their erotic histories, their desires, their inhibitions, their hesitations, their joys, their heartbreaks. They’re the most tacit of friends and the most silent of lovers—or, rather, in all likelihood they’re voluble and free-spoken, as intellectually and personally and verbally intimate as they are physically intimate, as passionate about their love lives as about the intellectual fires that drive them onward—but the movie doesn’t show them sharing these things. Guadagnino can’t be bothered to imagine (or to urge Ivory to imagine) what they might actually talk about while sitting together alone. Scenes deliver some useful information to push the plot ahead and then cut out just as they get rolling, because Guadagnino displays no interest in the characters, only in the story.
For that matter, Guadagnino offers almost nothing of Elio’s parents’ talk about whatever might be going on with their son and Oliver. Not that the parents (played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) are absentee—they’re present throughout, and there are even scenes featuring them apart from both Elio and Oliver, talking politics and movies with friends, but there isn’t a scene of them discussing their son’s relationship. They don’t express anything about it at all, whether approval or fear or even practical concern regarding the reactions of the neighbors. The characters of “Call Me by Your Name” are reduced to animated ciphers, as if Guadagnino feared that detailed practical discussions, or displays of freedom of thought and action, might dispel the air of romantic mystery and silent passion that he conjures in lieu of relationships. The elision of the characters’ mental lives renders “Call Me by Your Name” thin and empty, renders it sluggish; the languid pace of physical action is matched by the languid pace of ideas, and the result is an enervating emptiness.
There are two other characters whose near-total silence and self-effacement is a mark of Guadagnino’s blinkered and sanitized point of view—two domestic employees, the middle-aged cook and maid Mafalda (Vanda Capriolo) and the elderly groundskeeper and handyman Anchise (Antonio Rimoldi), who work for Elio’s family, the Perlmans. What do they think, and what do they say? They’re working for a Jewish family—the Perlmans, Elio tells Oliver (who’s also Jewish), are the only Jewish family in the region, even the only Jewish family ever to have set foot in the village—and they observe a brewing bond between Elio and Oliver. Do they care at all? Does the acceptance of this homosexual relationship exist in a bubble within the realm of intellectuals, and does that tolerance depend upon the silencing of the working class? Is there any prejudice anywhere in the area where the story takes place?
The one hint that there might be any at all comes in a brief scene of Elio and Oliver sharing a furtive caress in a shadowed arcade, when they brush hands and Oliver says, “I would kiss you if I could.” (That pregnant line, typically, ends the scene.) Even there, where the setting—the sight lines between the town at large and the character’s standpoint—is of dramatic significance, Guadagnino has no interest in showing a broad view of the location, because of his bland sensibility and flimsy directorial strategy, because of his relentless delivery of images that have the superficial charm of picture postcards. Adding a reverse angle or a broad pan shot on a setting is something that Guadagnino can’t be bothered with, because it would subordinate the scene’s narrow evocations to complexities that risk puncturing the mood just as surely as any substantive discussion might do.
To be sure, there’s much that a good movie can offer beside smart talk and deep confidences; for that matter, the development of characters is a grossly overrated quality in movies, and some of the best directors often do little of it. There’s also a realm of symbol, of gesture, of ideas, of emotions that arise from careful attention to images or a brusque gestural energy; that’s where Guadagnino plants the movie, and that’s where the superficiality of his artistry emerges all the more clearly. He has no sense of positioning, of composition, of rhythm, but he’s not free with his camera, either; his actors are more or less in a constant proscenium of a frame that displays their action without offering a point of view.
The intimacy of Elio and Oliver is matched by very little cinematic intimacy. There are a few brief images of bodies intertwined, some just-offscreen or cannily framed sex, but no real proximity, almost no closeups, no tactile sense, no point of view of either character toward the other. Guadagnino rarely lets himself get close to the characters, because he seems to wish never to lose sight of the expensive architecture, the lavish furnishings, the travelogue locations, the manicured lighting, the accoutrements that fabricate the sense of “order and beauty, luxury, calm, and sensuality.” All that’s missing is the Web site offering Elio-and-Oliver tours through the Italian countryside, with a stopover at the Perlman villa. Instead of gestural or pictorial evocations of intimacy, the performers act out the script’s emotions with a bland literalness that—due to the mechanistic yet vague direction—is often laughable, as in the case of the pseudo-James Dean-like grimacing that Guadagnino coaxes from Chalamet. Even the celebrated awkward dance that Oliver performs at an outdoor night spot was more exhilarating when performed to a Romanian song by an anonymous young man at a computer screen. Hammer is game, playful, and openhearted, but the scene as filmed is calculatedly cute and disingenuous. (Such faults in performance fall upon directors, not because they pull puppet strings but because they create the environment and offer the guidance from which the performances result, and then they choose what stays in the movie.)
There are moments of tenderness—telegraphed from miles away but nonetheless moving, as when Oliver grasps Elio’s bare shoulder and then makes light of it, when he reaches out to touch Elio’s hand, when Elio slides his bare foot over Oliver’s—that are simply and bittersweetly affecting. They’re in keeping with the story of a love affair of mutual discovery that is sheltered from social circumstances, from prejudice, from hostility, from side-eyes or religious dogma—and that nevertheless involves heartbreak. It’s a story about romantic melancholy and a sense of loss as a crucial element of maturation and self-discovery, alongside erotic exploration, fulfillment, and first love. The idea of the film is earnest, substantial, moving, and quite beautiful—in its idea, its motivation, its motivating principle. It offers, in theory, a sort of melancholy romantic realism. But, as rendered by Guadagnino, it remains at the level of a premise, a pitch, an index card.
Near the end of the film, Professor Perlman delivers a monologue to Elio that concentrates the movie’s sap of intellectualized understanding and empathy into a rich and potent Oscar syrup. The speech is moving and wise; Stuhlbarg’s delivery of it, in inflection and gesture, is finely burnished. Here, Guadagnino’s direction is momentarily incisive, in a way that it has not been throughout the film, perhaps because the professor’s academicized liberalism toward matters of sex is the one thing that truly excites the director. The entire film is backloaded—and it’s nearly emptied out in order for him to lay his cards, finally, on the table.
Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.” newyorker.com https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody
--- End quote ---
As I said, here is the GOOD REVIEW (Anthony Lane, December 4 Issue):
Anthony Lane
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 24, 2017, 05:26:08 pm ---
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.
--- End quote ---
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on December 08, 2017, 06:49:02 am ---
Here Jeff, is first:
the BAD REVIEW by Richard Brody (his blog online, Nov. 28 2017, also posted in the Bettermost Culture Tent New Yorker thread)
immediately followed below by:
the GOOD REVIEW by Anthony Lane (New Yorker December 4 Issue, also posted in this thread and also in the Bettermost Culture Tent New Yorker thread):
--- End quote ---
Thanks, John. I missed that on TNY thread. I know that at the end of Lane's reviews in the "hard copy" magazine, there is always a notation about Brody blogging about movies on line.
Hmmm. I think I need to see if I can download some of those photos of Armie Hammer. :laugh: I know a lot of people don't like "scruff," or beards of any kind, but in these pics I think they make him look more mature and less like a pretty-boy.
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