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

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 Peter Spears‏
                                       @pjspears

3:41 PM - 4 Oct 2017
5 Retweets 60 Likes

https://twitter.com/pjspears?lang=en&lang=en
https://twitter.com/pjspears/status/915708403888066560

This.




 Armie Hammer Global‏‏
                                      @ArmieHGlobal

3:23 PM - 4 Oct 2017
29 Retweets 106 Likes

https://twitter.com/ArmieHGlobal
https://twitter.com/ArmieHGlobal/status/915703978368880640

Call Me By Your Name posters in the subway in London




 iana @ LFF‏‏
                                       @yorgosIanthimos

3:19 PM - 4 Oct 2017
54 Retweets 194 Likes

https://twitter.com/yorgosIanthimos
https://twitter.com/yorgosIanthimos/status/915702858229714945

king’s cross st pancras !!
SHES HERE AND SHES BEAUTIFUL

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[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]

[youtube=800,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDe2cuViq8[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDe2cuViq8

Now THIS is the
interview we wanted
Wednesday evening!

Luca Guadagnino | Call Me by Your Name  Press Conference | NYFF55

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Published on Oct 4, 2017

Call Me by Your Name, director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory’s tender adaptation of André Aciman's novel is one of the year’s cinematic sensations. In a press conference, the director discussed his favorite movie romances, the Maurice Pialat film that inspired him most, À Nos Amours  (1983) how musician Sufjan Stevens acts as a narrator in Call Me by Your Name, and more.

A story of summer love unlike any other, the sensual new film from the director of I Am Love,  set in 1983, charts the slowly ripening romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet), an American teen on the verge of discovering himself, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), the handsome older grad student whom his professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) has invited to their vacation home in Northern Italy. Adapted from the wistful novel by André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name is Guadagnino’s most exquisitely rendered, visually restrained film, capturing with eloquence the confusion and longing of youth, anchored by a remarkable, star-making performance by Chalamet, always a nervy bundle of swagger and insecurity, contrasting with Hammer’s stoicism. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Special thanks to French Cultural Services.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

https://theplaylist.net/call-me-by-your-name-luca-guadagnino-20171005/

film society lincoln center NYFF55/2017
Call Me by Your Name
Luca Guadagnino Discusses Avoiding Cliches, Costumes & Narration

by Joe Blessing
October 5, 2017 12:22 pm


Luca Guadagnino speaks at NYFF55 film society lincoln center about his film Call Me by Your Name




NEW YORK -- One of the most anticipated films playing at the New York Film Festival is Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name.” An adaptation of the beloved novel by Andrè Aciman, “Call Me By Your Name” tells a story of sexual awakening and growth starring Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet as two young men who meet on the sun-drenched Italian coast in the summer of 1983. Sensual and sensitive, the film abjures the tragic element found in many gay romances and instead tells a joyous story of fleeting and formative young love. Guadagnino came to Lincoln Center to present his film and fielded questions from the press.


On clichés in the coming-of-age genre

Guadagnino shared that he was initially resistant to directing the film but that one reason he relished the chance was to correct flaws he saw in most coming-of-age films. He complained about the mechanistic way such films present growth as a result of resolving certain preconceived dilemmas, like choosing between two lovers. “The idea that there is a contrast against the lovers is a construct that is so artificial, that there has to be somebody that is going to contrast and that the love will triumph, or in the gay canon, the love will triumph and be bittersweet, or it will not triumph.”

While trying to avoid those clichés, he was inspired by the work of Maurice Pialat, specifically his 1983 film “A Nos Amours.” Guadagnino said, “What is great about Pialat’s cinema, is the capacity that he has always had to avoid the traps of a narrative and to be at the center of his characters and to really let live the flesh and bone and blood and sperm and every other kind of biological fluid to his characters in a way that is really connected with the audience because we are like the people on the screen.”

He continued that a specific goal for him was “that I wanted to show to myself that I could tell the story from the perspective of someone like Pialat instead of the perspective of three acts.”

Later, Guadagnino was asked about love stories on film that inspired him and he mentioned Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (showing “the morbidity of love”), “L’Atalante” by Jean Vigo, and “Voyage to Italy,” by Roberto Rossellini.


On capturing 1983 through costume design

Guadagnino said, “It was very important for us for the movie not to look period, for the movie not to look like a reflection on the 80s, the way cinema usually does, when it becomes period. It’s very difficult to resist the temptation of thinking of a period from our perspective, our idea of the 80s.” He elaborated on “2001” as an example of projecting current tendencies into the future only for the reality to look totally different and also on the extreme stylization of “Dick Tracy” as valid approaches, but said “what I prefer for myself is to be invisible. Which is probably the greatest of the artifices, to reconstruct something that is not there anymore but to try to be close to what it was.”

Guadagnino and his team achieved this verisimilitude through extensive research, with an assist from the residents of Crema, both his hometown and a shooting location for the film. “One thing we did, Crema is a very small village, so we found the opportunity to enter other people’s houses and they gave us their pictures of their ’80s. So we had a big, big book and we discovered a lot, for instance, not all the ladies had big shoulders, not all the ladies had big hair. This is something that has sort of become canon for ’80s representation, but it’s not exactly how it was. And again, the Maurice Pialat film was a great guide because that is a 1983 film.”


“Call Me By Your Name” was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics; it will be released in the U.S. November 24.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=650,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_D8bjc4SmE[/youtube]

Why Did You Shoot an Entire Feature Using Only One Lens?


Luca Guadagnino and Walter Fasano
director/co-writer/producer and co-writer/editor of
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
discuss their decision to shoot the film with one lens.



MovieMaker Magazine
Published on Feb 3, 2017

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://uproxx.com/movies/call-me-by-your-name-review-armie-hammer-sundance/




Sundance 2017
Sundance 2017 Review
Armie Hammer Finally Gets The Role He Deserves In The Fantastic
Call Me by Your Name
by MIKE RYAN
https://twitter.com/mikeryan
24 January 2017


Loving and respectful and tender ... Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name




There’s a scene near the end of Call Me By Your Name, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival, where Michael Stuhlbarg’s character delivers some of the most touching and heartfelt advice to his son, Elio (Timothée Chalamet), that I’ve ever seen on a movie screen. It’s the kind of scene that stops a viewer dead in his or her tracks because we know we’re watching something so special. Then we can’t help but think how many lives wouldn’t have been damaged if everyone had a parent this empathetic and wise. (I’ll come back to this.)

Armie Hammer's breakout role came by playing the Winklevoss twins in 2010’s now-classic The Social Network. (And it is crazy that movie is now pushing seven years old.) And he played the roles perfectly as brash, imposing and being able to deliver a cocky one-liner. But then Hollywood couldn’t quite figure out what to do with him.

His follow-up was as Clyde Tolson in Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar, a role and movie that looked much more interesting on paper than the drab result that Eastwood delivered. The Lone Ranger flopped at the box office, but this wasn’t Hammer’s fault – that movie is impossibly weird and strangely violent in comparison to how it was marketed and has already been reassessed as something unique and unusual in today’s blockbuster landscape. But even though Hammer might have those leading man, blockbuster movie looks, that’s not really where his talents lie.

(Strangely, one of my favorite performances from Hammer came when he played himself in the Entourage movie, of all things. This is not an actor who’s afraid to make fun of himself.)

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is underrated (I like this movie quite a bit), but I’m not convinced Hammer sporting a thick Russian accent is the best use of his talents. And in Nocturnal Animals, he’s the dickish, rich cheating husband that I was afraid Hammer was about to be typecast as forever.

Finally, finally, director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash) realized a way to use Hammer’s talents appropriately in Call Me By Your Name.

Hammer plays Oliver, an academic who is living with the Perlman family in Northern Italy circa 1983. Oliver is tall, handsome, seemingly confident, charming and sometimes a little arrogant. (A running joke in the film is when Oliver leaves a conversation he will just say “later” and takes off.) Elio soon finds himself intrigued by Oliver, and slowly that intrigue turns into something else that Elio is confused by, yet he can’t help himself from taking action.

There’s a beautiful scene when Elio tells Oliver about his feelings, staged around a small circular World War I memorial as the two keep getting further and further away from each other, than meeting on the other side. Oliver has feelings for Elio as well, but cautions that nothing can happen and advises Elio to just forget this was ever brought up and to continue on like nothing has ever happened.

Of course, that doesn’t last long. It starts with some innocent kissing in a field, then soon becomes scheduled rendezvous in remote locations for fear of getting caught by Elio’s parents (which would be devastating for both Elio and Oliver). Both actors are wonderful, but was Hammer does here is majestic. He could easily come off as the older creep, but that doesn’t happen. Hammer’s performance is loving and respectful and tender. He’s not taking advantage of Elio – Oliver genuinely has feelings for him – but is also deeply concerned this might be too much for the young man. The way this is all handled is touching and beautiful.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another recurring joke: Oliver’s dancing. Oh, he’s a big fan of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way” and breaks into maybe the funniest little ‘80s dance I’ve ever seen, mostly due to watching the impossibly tall Hammer in his short ‘80s shorts breaking into the lamest of dances– but yet he sells it with such gumption, if I saw this happening in real life it would be impossible not to just join in with him.)

At the beginning of this piece I mentioned Michael Stuhlbarg’s advice to Elio. I am not a parent, but I feel like I might make a better parent someday after watching this. Maybe it should be required viewing for new parents. Without giving too much away, it’s a master class in empathy in a situation where saying the wrong thing at this moment could damage Elio forever. It’s a statement on what we do to ourselves as we get older to protect ourselves emotionally, but in return slowly losing the passion that made us feel – losing the emotions that made us human and instead of burying those emotions, we should cherish them. It’s something only an older person can say to a younger person, and maybe something only the older person can even understand. Call Me By Your Name is a triumph of humanity.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Though viewers are sure to read much into the strange chemistry taking shape between Elio and Oliver, Luca Guadagnino concentrates his attention on the surface: a freshly prepared Italian breakfast, tree branches heavy with ripe fruit, the glowing sun on honeyed skin. But even as he indulges our senses with such details, the subtext becomes impossible to ignore.




http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/call-me-by-your-name-review-1201966646/




Sundance 2017
Call Me by Your Name
Sundance 2017 Review
I Am Love director Luca Guadagnino weaves a beguiling tale of first love
as  Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet share a steamy Italian summer

by Peter Debruge 
@AskDebruge
Monday 23 January 2017 12:15AM PT


Though Elio and his family have spent many a summer in Lombardy, something is different about this one —
Michael Stuhlbarg, Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name




As numerous are the ways in which Luca Guadagnino’s latest (and most personal) film, “Call Me by Your Name,” advances the canon of gay cinema, none impresses more than the fact that it’s not necessarily a gay movie at all — at least, not in the sense of being limited to LGBT festivals and audiences. Rather, the “I Am Love” director’s ravishingly sensual new film, adapted from André Aciman’s equally vivid coming-out/coming-of-age novel, is above all a story of first love — one that transcends the same-sex dynamic of its central couple, much as “Moonlight” has.

Acquired by Sony Pictures Classics shortly before its Sundance premiere, this Proustian account of an Italo-American 17-year-old’s transformative summer may not be as commercial as “Moonlight,” but it ought to be a word-of-mouth art-house hit all the same — especially when talk turns to what teenage Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and American summer guest Oliver (Armie Hammer) do with a ripe peach.

Had the film been made in 1983, when the book is set, or 2007, when it was published, the steamy forbidden-fruit scene would surely have landed an NC-17 rating. Today, neither audiences nor the MPAA seem quite so squeamish about such demonstrations of passion, no matter how nontraditional. If anything, the scandalous moment should only help the film to reach its fullest potential audience — as will its sun-blissed Northern Italy location.

Embracing the spirit, if not the letter of Aciman’s novel, Guadagnino and co-writers Walter Fasano and James Ivory (of the Merchant Ivory dynasty that brought us “Maurice” and “A Room With a View”) have resituated the action ever so slightly to Lombardy. The film takes place at the Perlmans’ vacation home, a spacious old villa not unlike the one seen in the Patricia Highsmith-esque, Guadagnino-produced short “Diarchy.” Every summer, Elio’s professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) hires a promising young doctoral student to assist with his research. This year, the Jewish family’s house guest is a 24-year-old golden boy of the kind that might once have graced the pages of Physique Pictorial  magazine.

Oliver’s arrival stirs something in Elio, though the teen is slow to confront his feelings. On one hand, he’s compelled to spend as much time with the newcomer as possible, serving as his guide on bike rides to town and frequent trips to the local swimming hole. At the same time, he’s protective of his own feelings, unsure how to read Oliver’s casual American attitude (the way his hand caresses Elio’s shoulder, or the aloof “Later” with which he signs off every conversation).

Though viewers are sure to read much into the strange chemistry taking shape between Elio and Oliver, Guadagnino concentrates his attention on the surface: a freshly prepared Italian breakfast, tree branches heavy with ripe fruit, the glowing sun on honeyed skin. But even as he indulges our senses with such details, the subtext becomes impossible to ignore.

Though Elio and his family have spent many a summer in Lombardy, something is different about this one — that much is clear in the way Elio interacts with longtime girlfriend Marzia (Esther Garrel). They’ve known each other since childhood and are so comfortable around one another, it seems a logical next step that they might choose to lose their virginity with one another. But Elio holds back temporarily, bragging to Oliver that he and Marzia could have had sex after a late-night swim, just to see what kind of reaction it gets.

Oliver is interested, but is clearly wary of acting on his desires, since Elio is not only inexperienced, but also his boss’ son. This seductive outsider correctly anticipates that anything physical that might happen between him and Elio will have a lasting impact on the young man’s sexual identity. And yet, the pair brazenly peacock for one another, parading around shirtless and leaving the doors to their shared bathroom ajar — an improvised mating ritual echoed by a low insect buzz that fills the soundtrack.

As played by Hammer, Oliver is the smoldering embodiment of cocky self-confidence, and yet, there’s an endearing vulnerability in the way he needs for Elio to make the first move — setting the tempo for the deliciously tentative courtship dance between them. Meanwhile, relative newcomer Chalamet combines the intellectual precocity and hot-blooded animal energy of a young Louis Garrel, circa “the Dreamers,” distinguishing himself via the character’s mastery of three languages (English, French, and Italian) and two musical instruments (guitar and piano).

As Elio and Oliver’s attraction become more brazen, the question remains how much of their “special friendship” registers with Elio’s parents. The boy’s mother (Amira Casar) certainly picks up on the impact Oliver has had on her son, even going so far as to suggest that the two spend a few days alone together before Oliver ships off to New Jersey. As for Elio’s father, Guadagnino has done justice to one of the book’s key passages, crafting an exquisite scene in which Stuhlbarg’s character bares his soul via a terrific monologue delivered after the boy returns home — putting to rest a question subtly raised earlier in the film, when a homoerotic slide show doubles as a hesitant proposition of sorts.

No matter how intellectually progressive the Perlman family is, no father has ever said something so open-minded and eloquent to his son, and yet, the film offers this conversation as a gift to audiences who might have desperately needed to hear it in their own lives. This splendid conversation makes such an impact, the film could have ended there (the novel follows the characters for years more), though Guadagnino does supply a bittersweet coda that implies how the two leads look back on that summer — further suggesting that the film isn’t a literal rendering of Elio’s experience, but a bittersweet embellishment of his memory. These were the days that shaped him, marked by the intense tastes, textures, and odors that Guadagnino so effectively amplifies for the viewer’s benefit.

Back in Italy, some critics have held Guadagnino’s work in advertising and brand promotions against him, whereas here in the States, audiences hold no such grudges, responding instead to the director’s cinematic virtuosity. Even as he beguiles us with mystery, Guadagnino recreates Elio’s life-changing summer with such intensity that we might as well be experiencing it first-hand. It’s a rare gift that earns him a place in the pantheon alongside such masters of sensuality as Pedro Amodóvar and François Ozon, while putting “Call Me by Your Name” on par with the best of their work.



Sundance Film Review: 'Call Me by Your Name'

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), Jan. 22, 2017. Running time: 132 MIN.

PRODUCTION: A Sony Pictures Classics release of a RT Features, Frenesy Film Co., La Cinéfacture production. (International sales: Memento Films, Paris.) Producers: Peter Spears, Luca Guadagnino, Emilie Georges, Rodrigo Teixeira, Marco Morabito. Executive producers: James Ivory, Howard Rosenman, Tom Dolby, Naima Abed, Nicholas Kaiser, Lourenço Sant'Anna, Sophie Mas, Francesco Melzi d'Eril, Derek Simonds, Margarethe Baillou.

CREW: Director: Luca Guadagnino. Screenplay, James Ivory, Guadagnino, Walter Fasano. Camera (color, widescreen): Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Editor: Walter Fasano. Music: Sufjan Stevens.

WITH: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel, Victoire Du Bois, Vanda Capriolo, Antonio Rimoldi, Elena Bucci, Marco Sgrosso.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://variety.com/2017/film/global/james-ivory-why-wont-u-s-actors-do-nude-scenes-starting-with-call-me-by-your-name-stars-1202581485/




James Ivory
on
Call Me by Your Name
and

Why American Male Actors Won’t Do Nude Scenes

(EXCLUSIVE)

by Nick Vivarelli  
@NickVivarelli
OCTOBER 6, 2017 4:20AM PT





The city of Florence feted director-writer James Ivory this week with its Fiorino d’Oro prize and three days of celebrations for the 30th anniversary of “A Room With a View,” the triple-Oscar-winning film that proved to be a game-changer for Ivory and his longtime producer and partner in life, Ismail Merchant. “A Room With a View” paved the way for their work on Hollywood pics such as “The Remains of the Day,” and was groundbreaking in its depiction of male nudity – a topic about which Ivory, who wrote the screenplay for new gay coming-of-age film “Call Me by Your Name,” directed by Luca Guadagnino, has strong feelings.

Ivory, 89, spoke with Variety from Florence. Here are excerpts from the interview, edited for concision and clarity.


One of the things that’s been pointed out about “Room” is the nudity in the scene when three men strip naked, jump in a lake, and start splashing and wrestling. It’s a type of carefree male nudity which you recently said hadn’t been seen onscreen before, and hasn’t been seen since. How deliberate was that?
My idea of the Sacred Lakes sequence, as it is called, was that it really had to be as Forster described it. We’d never really been bound by the studio requirements on things like nudity, so I said, “Let’s just do it, and what is seen is seen.” It was not even a “yes or no” decision. I had no idea that scene would get so much attention. It gets tremendous amounts of laughter. I had no idea that it was such a comical scene as well.


So it wasn’t a deliberate attempt to do something different.
I just figured, “Let it be.” I’ve always thought that about nudity. There are moments when I think the story demands it, and if you don’t get it you feel sort of short-changed. And I’ve felt that way about some other films as well, particularly “Maurice.” That said, I’m glad we broke some sort of barrier. But it all depends on nationalities. For instance, if you were to make that film today and you had American actors, it would be in their contract that they could not be shown nude. But in those days — in the ’80’s and these were all British actors — they didn’t give a damn!


There are two American actors in “Call Me by Your Name.” Armie Hammer has said he was nervous about all the nudity that was originally in the script.
Certainly in my screenplay there was all sorts of nudity. But according to Luca, both actors had it in their contract that there would be no frontal nudity, and there isn’t, which I think is kind of a pity. Again, it’s just this American attitude. Nobody seems to care that much, or be shocked, about a totally naked woman. It’s the men. This is something that must be so deeply cultural that one should ask: “Why?”


Can you talk about the part you played in the long journey of “Call Me by Your Name”?
Some friends of mine [producers Peter Spears and Howard Rosenman] bought the screen rights to the novel by Andre Aciman, and were trying in various ways to make it into a film. They couldn’t find a director and eventually they picked Luca, who then apparently said: “Let me co-direct it with James Ivory.” So they came and asked me and I said OK, but I also said: “If I’m going to direct it, then I want to write a screenplay.” That took several months, and that’s the screenplay that they then raised money on to finally make the film. Then at a certain point it was decided that they wanted just one director, and it was going to be Luca. I didn’t mind that much. I was still very much involved. We were working together right up to the point of the shoot.


You’ve often said that after “A Room With a View” you could have done anything. You chose to make “Maurice,” a passion project that your regular screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, didn’t want to write. What was the urgency of “Maurice” for you? Did it have something to do with a desire to put a gay romance onscreen?
Not in that sense, no. Because of the many years spent in India, I had re-read “A Passage to India,” and that made me curious about all the rest of Forster’s novels. And in time I came to “Maurice” [a posthumously published E.M. Forster novel about same-sex love]. We had just made “A Room With a View” and I thought: “This is the other side of the coin.” As a story it’s again about muddled young people who are ready to live a lie rather than live truthfully, and I thought the two of them really go together.


“Maurice” has been considered too gay for its time, which may explain why even though it won a prize in Venice, reaction to the film was quite muted.
In New York nobody dwelled on that aspect. But in England, where almost every important film critic was gay, they came out against the film. Their reactions to it were extraordinary! You’d think that they would have been supportive, but they were afraid to be supportive.


The  London Times reportedly wondered whether “so defiant a salute to homosexual passion should really be welcomed during a spiraling AIDS crisis.”
That’s the thing. That sums up a hidden attitude on the part of gay writers for those papers.


Do you think the climate has changed enough, perhaps thanks to “Moonlight,” so that “Call Me by Your Name” won’t suffer from the type of muted response that “Maurice” was met with?
I think so. It’s already happening. Every time “Call Me” is shown at a film festival, people are raving about it.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=700,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCJquKusENs[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCJquKusENs

Luca Guadagnino | Call Me by Your Name  
NYFF Live discussion | NYFF55

with stars
Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer,
and Michael Stuhlbarg

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Published on Oct 7, 2017

In between a pair of sold-out screenings that earned standing ovations, the team behind Call Me by Your Name—director Luca Guadagnino and stars Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, and Michael Stuhlbarg—joined us for an NYFF Live discussion [and on Facebook]. In a conversation moderated by Nigel M. Smith, they talked about their idyllic summer in Italy, the adaptation process, how the casting came together, their favorite classic films, if we might ever see a sequel, and more. Call Me by Your Name opens on November 24 courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

A story of summer love unlike any other, the sensual new film from the director of I Am Love,  set in 1983, charts the slowly ripening romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet), an American teen on the verge of discovering himself, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), the handsome older grad student whom his professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) has invited to their vacation home in Northern Italy. Adapted from the wistful novel by André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name is Guadagnino’s most exquisitely rendered, visually restrained film, capturing with eloquence the confusion and longing of youth, anchored by a remarkable, star-making performance by Chalamet, always a nervy bundle of swagger and insecurity, contrasting with Hammer’s stoicism. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Special thanks to French Cultural Services.

Also: https://www.facebook.com/NYFilmFest/videos/1575588282498937/?hc_ref=ARSan8jkeLchqnHOzfYeOgny98_2WlYWGhQATdQZXFXmueiRlJmTMex-EeaX6kicAK0
https://www.facebook.com/CallMeByYourNameFilm/

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

By now, I think I’ve made clear my disdain for the beautifying of gay life for the sake of pandering to those who find it inherently unseemly. The idea that in order to be considered fully human, one must reduce his or her humanity is fundamentally absurd. If a straight person’s motive is to hate the sin but love the sinner, I’m not going to help them carry out their cockamamie logic for the sake of keeping everyone feeling comfortable.

So on that very crucial level, Call Me By Your Name  does not work for me, does not speak to me, does not speak for me. On almost every other level, though, it does.

This is a sumptuous, lovely film, a perfectly rendered memory of a perfect moment in its characters’ lives. It captures something Elio and Oliver would hold onto forever if memories were tangible, and it makes you feel privileged for consuming it in a way that allows you to go back and replay it exactly as it happened. Call Me By Your Name  is a triumph of aesthetics over politics in a time when art is more likely than ever to be judged for what it represents instead of what it actually does.





https://themuse.jezebel.com/call-me-by-your-name-and-the-art-of-compromise-1819157333


film society lincoln center NYFF55/2017
Luca Guadagnino's
Call Me by Your Name
and the Art of Compromise

by Rich Juzwiak
Friday Oct 6 2017 2:20pm


“Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight.” At film society lincoln center NYFF55: Timothee Chalamet in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name




NEW YORK -- Just when Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name  is about to give what you want—what it’s spent over an hour building up to—it cruelly denies it. As principal characters Oliver (Armie Hammer) and the decidedly younger Elio (Timothee Chalamet) begin to consummate the sexual tension that’s been building since Oliver entered the frame in the movie’s first few minutes, Guadagnino’s camera turns toe and glides off. It pans away from the bed they’re on to peer out of the nearby window, settling on a tree as Oliver and Elio exchange sighs. No mere cut, the stylistic anomaly that is this tracking shot in a film otherwise devoid of them is a deliberate move that seems to signal modesty if we’re being charitable (and sexual shame on the part of an openly gay filmmaker, if we aren’t).

Guadagnino has gone on to explain just how pointed this decision was. Shortly after his film debuted at Sundance this year to a rapturous response, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter  he was asked about the lack of explicit sex in his movie. The director responded:



I wasn’t interested at all. The tone would’ve been very different from what I was looking for. I wanted the audience to completely rely on the emotional travel of these people and feel first love. I didn’t want the audience to find any difference or discrimination toward these characters. It was important to me to create this powerful universality, because the whole idea of the movie is that the other person makes you beautiful—enlightens you, elevates you. The other is often confronted with rejection, fear or a sense of dread, but the welcoming of the other is a fantastic thing to do, particularly in this historical moment.



The idea that in order to foster “universality” and shield characters in a same-sex affair from malignant discrimination (or merely the benign detection of difference) bespeaks a form of covering—a term coined by writer Kenji Yoshino to describe the suppression of integral parts of one’s personhood (in Yoshino’s context: sexuality and race) in order to be accepted by greater straight society. “To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream,” wrote Yoshino in his 2006 book Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights.

Covering is a highly effective tactic—respectability politics that removed sex from sexuality were crucial in the ultimate victory of marriage equality. But it’s also a massive burden on queer people to manage and compartmentalize their sexuality in a world where heterosexuality and heteronormativity are so unavoidable that they’re as integral to life and easy to take for granted as the air we breathe.

Now, Call Me By Your Name  is an unmistakably gay romance featuring two men who have sex unmistakably. Vintage Will & Grace  it ain’t. We aren’t looking at an entirely neutered portrayal of gay partnership—there is, in fact a scene that occurs the day after Oliver and Elio have sex, in which Oliver drops to his knees, briefly fellates Elio and then retreats (he says it’s to test Elio’s virility but it’s clearly mostly to fuck with him). Neither this nor the slight consummation scene, though, have quite the intensity or grit of an earlier scene portraying hetero sex, in which Elio fucks a girl around his age named Marzia (Esther Garrel), at least partially to take his obsessive mind off of Oliver. We watch him pumping on top of her for a while, his back to the camera, and then apologizing profusely when he comes too soon.

Further, Guadagnino frequently zigs when the source material compels him to zag. A scene in the book in which Oliver and Elio shit in front of each other, reifying their bond, is perhaps unsurprisingly nowhere to be found, and the movie’s already infamous scene, in which Elio masturbates with a peach under his boxers, comes devoid of the book’s payoff: Oliver eating it with Elio’s semen in it. In the film, Elio starts crying before Oliver can take a bite.

By now, I think I’ve made clear my disdain for the beautifying of gay life for the sake of pandering to those who find it inherently unseemly. The idea that in order to be considered fully human, one must reduce his or her humanity is fundamentally absurd. If a straight person’s motive is to hate the sin but love the sinner, I’m not going to help them carry out their cockamamie logic for the sake of keeping everyone feeling comfortable.

So on that very crucial level, Call Me By Your Name  does not work for me, does not speak to me, does not speak for me. On almost every other level, though, it does.

This is a sumptuous, lovely film, a perfectly rendered memory of a perfect moment in its characters’ lives. It captures something Elio and Oliver would hold onto forever if memories were tangible, and it makes you feel privileged for consuming it in a way that allows you to go back and replay it exactly as it happened. Its vivid pastel hues repeatedly evoke watercolor paintings. Its actors’ vitality and chemistry imbue its world of extraordinary luxury with realism. For me, Call Me By Your Name  is a triumph of aesthetics over politics in a time when art is more likely than ever to be judged for what it represents instead of what it actually does. I do not love its methods of selling itself as palatable, but I very much enjoy the overall product.

Besides, Call Me By Your Name  was always going to be marked by compromise. What’s so special about its source material, André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name, is, in fact, not its love story, which is rather spare and generic (24-year-old philosophy student Oliver stays for the summer with two scholars in their Northern Italy summer home, has an affair with their 17-year-old son). What’s truly distinctive about the book is the narrator Elio’s anxious, stream-of-conscious narrative that picks through every bit of minutiae in Oliver’s behavior, interrogating his intentions, his feelings, the actual meaning behind his every move. A seven-word note that Oliver writes Elio—“Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight.”—yields two pages of dissection from Elio in Aciman’s novel. In Guadagnino’s movie, Elio merely reads it once in voiceover.

In its method of storytelling, Aciman’s book ultimately speaks to how much of our objects of desire are projections of our own imagination—Oliver remains a sparsely sketched mystery throughout even after his feelings for Elio are mutual, even after Elio has filled over 200 pages with his hypotheses and responses. In that sense, Guadagnino’s aforementioned summation of the movie’s theme—“the other person makes you beautiful—enlightens you, elevates you”—is not a precise replication of Aciman’s but its inverse. It’s a subtle but crucial distinction: Aciman suggests that you make the other person beautiful. Though the book is largely set in the early ’80s (as is the movie, entirely), the idea that what we desire is so informed by our own minds remains extremely relevant in the age of geolocation apps, when so many men meet their partners on the basis of a few textually exchanged words and some still photographs, their minds filling in the blanks and ultimately leading them to share space with the actual human behind the image they’ve created.

Via the movie’s rendering in flesh of what exist as just ideas in the book, we get much more of a sense of the connection between Elio and Oliver. Armey Hammer is beaming with charisma, his character’s every invitation to Elio (to go into town, to go swimming) ratchets up the sexual tension in a far more straightforward, palatable way than the jittery, is-he-or-isn’t-he way it plays out in the book. Timothee Chalamet carries Elio with a deeper self-assuredness than the book allows—the kid is, after all, a genius who plays multiple instruments and speaks multiple languages. His subtle declaration of love for Oliver on a piazetta comes out as matter-of-fact in the movie, whereas in the book it gushes out like champagne that’s been shaken since it was bottled. And though Oliver’s age is never specified, Hammer would never be mistaken for 24 (he’s now 31). The considerably increased age difference from the book’s seven years makes Oliver’s mentorship and his treatment of Elio as an equal more poignant.

It’s easy to get swept up in the film’s many riches—the outdoor scenery is so lush with greenery you can practically smell the grass, and there’s a scene that takes place at a lake that’s one big gorgeous blue-green ombre. Everything—the sky, the water, the mountains—falls on its unique point between those two colors. And then maybe at some point, you’ll realize like I did that this in many ways beyond its portrayal of sex, this is the most mainstream user-friendly version of a gay relationship possible. Two impossibly good-looking, charismatic white guys have an effortlessly loving bond while swaddled in affluence with nothing better to do then feed their brains with books and their souls with each other. They devote their summer to leisure and waste not a second. The closest thing this film has to an antagonist is the limited nature of their time together (Elio’s parents, especially his father, are so compassionate it’s almost surreal). It untangles the struggle and turmoil from the typical depictions of same-sex romance. This is far from everyone’s reality, but then Call Me By Your Name  is a fantasy, as most movies are.

Moments before the film ends, a now-absent Oliver proves his enduring love to Elio by declaring, “I remember everything!” It was Call Me By Your Name ’s execution of rose-colored retrospect that I related to far beyond its depiction of a gay relationship, and it was its invoking of the melancholy of time’s passage that pressed out my sadness. By now, I should be used to the inevitable malaise that sets in at the end of August, and yet it hits me just as hard, year after year.

It is the transmission of halcyon and the ensuing tragedy of its evaporation that Guadagnino nails in his adaptation. In the book, Oliver refers to the place “right on the tiled edge of the pool” at Elio’s house, where he sunbathes everyday, as “heaven.” I don’t remember him calling it that in the movie, but he doesn’t need to because it’s obvious that’s what it is.


Call Me By Your Name is currently playing the New York Film Festival and will open in New York and Los Angeles on November 24.