Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find love in Call Me By Your Name (2017)

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANART
https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__


by @mellowbeat__

https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__/status/936925430761664512
https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__

미묘하다
Subtle II

CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANART by @mellowbeat__

https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__

3:50 AM - 2 Dec 2017 3 Likes

#CMBYN   #CallMeByYourName #laterpeaches  #🍑
#oliver  #ulliva  #elio  #elio perlman
#armie hammer  #timothée chalamet   #andré aciman  #luca guadagnino  
#book   #novel   #film  #movie  #sonyclassics   #lgbt
#art #artwork #artist #illustration

CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANART
https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__


by @mellowbeat__

https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__/status/904271579848130560
https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__

미묘하다
Subtle

CALLMEBYYOURNAMEFANART by @mellowbeat__

https://twitter.com/mellowbeat__

2:15 AM - 3 Sep 2017 2 Likes

#CMBYN   #CallMeByYourName #laterpeaches  #🍑
#elio perlman  #oliver  #ulliva
#timothée chalamet   #armie hammer #andré aciman  #luca guadagnino  
#book   #novel   #film  #movie  #sonyclassics   #lgbt
#art #artwork #artist #illustration

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

The film was shot in continuity, which allowed us to witness the onscreen maturity of both protagonist and actor. The experience became a dual rite of passage. “The main lesson tells us in a very delicate way that you should follow who you are,” editor Walter Fasano said. “And Timothée embodies this perfectly. The other day, I saw him at one of the premieres, and already, at 21, he’s another person. And so the [performance] really did grab that special moment of growing up in life and in front of the camera.”




http://www.indiewire.com/2017/12/call-me-by-your-name-luca-guadagnino-editing-oscars-1201903009/



Call Me by Your Name
Editing Was Crucial to the Year’s Best Love Story
Editor Walter Fasano discusses how he cut the Oscar-contending
coming-of-age drama, including the infamous peach scene.

by Bill Desowitz
@BillDesowitz
Dec 1, 2017 5:18 pm


Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name



With an affectionate nod to Bernardo Bertolucci and Eric Rohmer, Luca Guadagnino has made the year’s best love story: Call Me By Your Name. The same sex romance starring NYFCC Best Actor winner Timothée Chalamet (a breakout revelation) and Armie Hammer (who’s seductively feline) leads to something far more sublime than summer love. And it’s a movie in which desire and liberation blossom in the inviting and beautiful landscape of Northern Italy.

For Walter Fasano (Guadagnino’s go-to editor for 21 years), this dance of desire between 17-year-old Elio (Chalamet) and 24-year-old Oliver (Hammer) provided both an inner and outer poetry. “Our main intention was to let characters and the landscape breathe and not overwhelm with the editing,” he said. “At the same time, we wanted to have a control of the style and music editing for the ins and outs of shots because we did not want our personal taste to look self-indulgent.”

Based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman and adapted by James Ivory and Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name  was shot near the director’s home in Crema, less than an hour from Milan, principally in a 17th century villa. Fasano said the close proximity for Guadagnino enhanced the relaxed, improvisational atmosphere of the production (shot on 35mm by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom).


A Dual Rite of Passage
Finding the right tempo, though, became its own rhythmic dance: When to hold on the performance or when to cut. “To stay in the shot and not to cut, cut, cut may give the impression of being correct in the progression of the story and never be boring,” Fasano said. “Well, sometimes if you cut, cut, cut, you can give the impression that something is wrong and maybe creating some kind of tension that can get boring.”

The film was shot in continuity, which allowed us to witness the onscreen maturity of both protagonist and actor. The experience became a dual rite of passage. “The main lesson tells us in a very delicate way that you should follow who you are,” Fasano said. “And Timothée embodies this perfectly. The other day, I saw him at one of the premieres, and already, at 21, he’s another person. And so the [performance] really did grab that special moment of growing up in life and in front of the camera.”

http://www.mynewplaidpants.com/2016/06/armie-is-still-taking-italy.html

https://twitter.com/cmbynmovie

Keeping the Glass of Water Scene
The editor’s favorite scene almost didn’t made the cut when one of the producers insisted that it was inconsequential. “They’re on their bikes and they go inside a courtyard where there is an image of Mussolini and a woman is cleaning some vegetables,” Fasano said. “And they ask for some water. And then they go back on their bikes, but that long shot when you can see them disappear into the distance, you start feeling that sun on the skin experience.”

“And so at the end of this hike, before they get to the place where they first kiss, Ravel’s music [“Une Barque sur L’Ocean”] is played, and they’re suddenly interrupted. It’s an abrupt cut that ends a moment of quiet, but at the same time it reminds you of the way you remember things where your recollection could stop immediately.”


The Importance of Bach
Music plays an important part of the movie. Along with two original songs by Sufijan Stevens (“Mystery of Love” and “Visions of Gideon”) and the inclusion of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” there are various classical pieces, including the aforementioned Ravel. However, the most important was Bach’s “Capriccio on the Departure of his Beloved Brother,” which Elio plays on guitar and piano.

But the way Elio teasingly alters the arrangement brings him closer to Oliver. It’s a form of foreplay yet also conveys control. “So he plays the guitar outside and then he goes to the piano,” said Fasano. “It’s the spark of an idea and he tells Oliver to follow him. Then there is this long shot without a camera move that is incredibly good. The movie is full of these subtle games and paths.”


The Peach Scene
The infamous peach scene from the novel, in which Elio masturbates with the hallowed out fruit and Oliver partakes of it, got changed in the movie. “Luca was very good at creating the perfect look and feel with our wonderful cinematographer, Sayombhu, and Timothée did the rest,” the editor said.

“It was just a couple of takes, timing was perfect, everything was very delicate, and we just put things together, being very attentive and the radio playing in the background. So, in a way, it was easy.”

Then Oliver entered and the tension takes a comical turn when he makes fun of Elio. “It’s the fear of being discovered and the fear of the separation, because, in a couple of days Oliver is running away,” added Fasano. “And the boldness of Oliver wanting to drink the juice is stopped by this incredible outcome. Again, they gave me everything and I just needed to put it together.”


A Father’s Speech
Another important scene involved the loving support provided by Elio’s father (brilliantly played by Michael Stuhlbarg) after a moment of heartbreak. In an unforgettable monologue, Mr. Perlman confesses envy for his son’s passion and implores him to follow his desire, despite the pain, and not shut himself off from emotional depth.

https://laterpeaches.tumblr.com/post/166541710078/bowie28-call-me-by-your-name-uk-trailer
http://bowie28.tumblr.com/post/166541404810

“It comes from the novel, and then it’s Michael’s magic after Luca put him at the most comfortable position,” Fusano said. “Then Luca said to me the same thing he tells his barber: ‘Please don’t cut too much. I just want to see a maximum of four cuts. But let the performance speak. I think Michael did it in three takes on three different levels of getting emotional. There was a moment in one cut where there was piano playing underneath, but we decided that silence was the best thing.”

[youtube=999,600]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRfoIKjwHvQ[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRfoIKjwHvQ

This clip has been
floating out there for weeks--
finally now on Youtube!

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME  (2017)
Clip: "Play that again--please!"

Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet

Movieclips Film Festivals & Indie Films
Published on Nov 14, 2017

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnYNjhkBNiw[/youtube]

Re Timmy/Elio's playful passage,
see 06:34 - 7:54
Postilion's aria: Allegro poco

Bach - Capriccio in B-flat major BWV 992
("On the Departure of a Beloved Brother")
by Leon Fleisher

pianushko
Published on Sep 14, 2013

[youtube=780,750]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTYUyDjVCRU[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTYUyDjVCRU

Maurice Ravel: Miroirs III. Une Barque sur L'Ocean (1904-1905)
(pianist André Laplante)

Sounds familiar....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Ravel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miroirs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Laplante

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 LA Film Critics‏‏
                                       @LAFilmCritics

3:12 PM - 3 Dec 2017
1629 Retweets 1,144 Likes

https://twitter.com/LAFilmCritics
https://twitter.com/LAFilmCritics/status/937459605168197633

Best Picture, Winner:
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME



2:58 PM - 3 Dec 2017
559 Retweets 1,153 Likes

https://twitter.com/LAFilmCritics
https://twitter.com/LAFilmCritics/status/937456021215178752

BEST DIRECTOR, Winner:
Guillermo del Toro, THE SHAPE OF WATER  AND
Luca Guadagnino,
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME  (TIE)




2:24 PM - 3 Dec 2017
854 Retweets 1,624 Likes

https://twitter.com/LAFilmCritics
https://twitter.com/LAFilmCritics/status/937447418601209856

BEST ACTOR, Winner:
Timothée Chalamet,
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME




ALSO SEE:

http://variety.com/2017/film/awards/2017-los-angeles-film-critics-association-awards-1202629006/

Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. Crowns ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Best Picture of 2017
DECEMBER 3, 2017 10:33AM PT

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 New York Film Critics Circle‏‏‏
                                       @nyfcc

30 Nov 2017

https://twitter.com/hashtag/NYFCC?src=hash
https://twitter.com/IndieWire/status/936297705709690881
https://twitter.com/EW/status/936298651709771778
https://twitter.com/Variety/status/936304602567254017
https://twitter.com/THR/status/936298408146538497

BEST ACTOR, Winner:
Timothée Chalamet,
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME




ALSO SEE:

http://variety.com/2017/film/awards/2017-new-york-film-critics-circle-awards-voting-1202626767/

‘Lady Bird’ Named Best Picture by New York Film Critics Circle
NOVEMBER 30, 2017 8:05AM PT

Best Actor: Timothée Chalamet (“Call Me by Your Name”)
A breakthrough staple so far this season, Chalamet has caught fire as a bona fide lead actor contender in this year’s race. He’s also
had a busy year, appearing in “Hostiles” and “Lady Bird” as well. He is the youngest best actor winner in NYFCC history.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

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.




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


Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name



Call Me by Your Name is a love story that seems, on the surface (and a ripe and gorgeous surface it is), to be all about the lyrical sensations of erotic and emotional discovery. The back-and-forth glances that could mean everything or nothing. The slow-burn calculus of mutual seduction. The tactility of flesh and food and freedom and summer. The ache of a desire that only expands the more it’s fulfilled. (And damn, what about that peach?) Yet if Call Me by Your Name  were nothing more than the swoony tale of a high-art summer fling, it might not amount to all that much. The film’s true subject, in almost every scene, is what it looks like, and what it means, when everything the two people in question are doing and thinking and feeling has to remain hidden.

Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the dreamy, bookish 17-year-old son of an antiquities  professor (Michael Stuhlbarg), whiling away the summer on his family’s lavish villa in Northern Italy, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), the tall, suave, and handsome doctoral candidate who’s staying there on a six-week research fellowship, take a good long time to zero in on their shared desire. That’s because they’re speaking in code. It’s not just that they never talk about their feelings for each other; they barely talk about the fact that they never talk about their feelings. (Even their hiding remains hidden.) The entire movie is a poeticized meditation on the experience of the closet: what it’s like to live there, how it once worked (even when things were starting to open up), and why it had to go away. (Not that it completely has, obviously.) Call Me by Your Name  is a love story, but it’s really a spy movie. Right to the end, its drama erupts out of what happens, and what gets spoken, between the lines.

Almost everything that transpires between Elio and Oliver has the furtive, heightened quality of a tradecraft secret: their first physical contact during a volleyball game, when Oliver gives Elio an impromptu shoulder rub that may or may not be sexually suggestive (it’s confirmed only later that it was a purposefully dropped hint); the fantastically oblique dialogue they have in the middle of the town square, when they’re completely alone yet still act as if their words are being surreptitiously recorded — a remarkable sequence that the director, Luca Guadagnino, stages with a slow long circular camera movement that might have come out of a Spielberg espionage thriller, with a line like “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” veering about as close to a confession of desire as anyone in the movie gets; the swimming, biking, and lolling-in-the-grass sequences, a case of would-be lovers hiding in plain sight; and the final phone conversation, in which the revelation of an impending marriage is treated as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Elio and Oliver both have involvements with women, which could make referring to either character as “gay” sound reductive. Yet their affair defines them both: It’s the love that Oliver embraces but can’t accept — and the one that allows Elio to open the door to who he is.

The singular pull, and quiet power, of Call Me by Your Name  relates to the fact that nearly every movie you could think of that deals with the hiding — that is, the suppression — of gay life carries an overt message. Brokeback Mountain,  for instance, was a romantic tragedy that depicted the price of sexual freedom as nothing less than survival. (The price of being openly gay was being murdered.) Far from Heaven,  a heightened soap opera of dazzlingly ironic sincerity, was rooted in the anguished yearning of Dennis Quaid’s character — an executive on the down-low who experiences his erotic longings as a curse from which he can only dream of escaping

Call Me by Your Name,  by contrast, features no overt element of moral reckoning and, significantly, no component of shame. The film unfolds in a tranquil art-film Eden of robust sensual delight, and the distinguishing feature of Armie Hammer’s performance is its cool, calm, and collected charisma; his presence hums with a blithely macho low-voiced command, the way Jon Hamm’s did on Mad Men.  Oliver treats the high secrecy of his desires not as a curse but as a law of the universe, and we have to guess a bit as to his motivations. How much of his outwardly “straight” identity comes from the fact that he’s worried about disrupting his tenure track, and how much comes from the fact that his father, as he says at one point, would have him committed otherwise? Since the film is set in 1983, 14 years after the Stonewall riots unleashed the era of gay liberation, a part of us wonders: If you’re so damn confident, why not just be who you are?

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.




COMMENTS:


DECEMBER 3, 2017 AT 12:20 PM
Pat says:

Watched Call Me By Your Name  twice and I believe once it expand and more people watching, the box office will be propelled by repeat viewing. Nowadays it’s rare to watch a movie that sticks in your brain after leaving the cinema. I am still thinking this movie a lot after I watched it the first time in AFI Fest, because I believe the story deeply resonates with a lot people no matter what’s your sexual orientation.




DECEMBER 3, 2017 AT 12:52 PM
Mckey Smith says:

I’d like to know what women think of this movie.




DECEMBER 3, 2017 AT 1:45 PM
DaGP says:

Woman, here. It is a beautiful love story. And wow, the sexual chemistry between Elio and Oliver is intense. The pacing of the film helps build the sexual tension, so when things really get going, it is a release and relief.




DECEMBER 3, 2017 AT 4:20 PM
Kelz says:

Also a woman. However, I haven’t seen the film yet, I just became obsessed with it after seeing the trailer (which gave me chills) and falling down a wormhole of clips and interviews (also have an art history degree). I just requested the book from my local library and look forward to the film coming to my local indie theatre.

This is a fantastic review by the way!




DECEMBER 3, 2017 AT 4:54 PM
Jon says:

I don’t think any movie ever depicted my life as a 20-year old more accurately. I was right between Oliver and Elio in age in 1983. I slept with girls (had a very serious gf who is still one of my best friends) but fell madly in love with a guy who broke my heart into pieces, partly because his life was “too gay” for me (internalized homophobia). At that time the conventional wisdom was, if you had a choice to not be gay you wouldn’t be gay. I married the mother of my children after my broken heart and lived a closeted life, claiming to be “bi” for the 12 years we were married. Then I met the love of my life and unlike the the first time, I made the decision to be myself and we’ve been together ever since.

This movie was one of the best and most universal I’ve ever seen. The end is devastating. I saw it a week ago and I still can’t shake it.

[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__

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

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*

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

[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]

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.

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

"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

As I said, here is the GOOD REVIEW (Anthony Lane, December 4 Issue):




Anthony Lane

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.

[Jeff Wrangler]

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):

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.    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.