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

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

I agree--it's stunning!

Oh my, yes--I cannot wait! What a gift for Thanksgiving weekend!  




Though Armie Hammer might be the bigger star and he certainly has a juicier-than-usual role here that he clearly relishes, the true breakout of the film is 21-year-old Timothée Chalamet. Elio is someone who is experiencing a lot of things for the first time, for which he barely has any words, but Chalamet’s face and body language turn his character into an open book. The minutes-long and wordless final shot, another rare close-up of Elio, is so mesmerizing that it immediately cements his status as one of the world’s brightest young talents. The chemistry between the men is palpable, but what's more important, they convey their characters' complex emotions, expectations and thoughts without necessarily opening their mouths.




http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/call-me-by-your-name-review-967150





Call Me by Your Name
Sundance 2017 Review
Luca Guadagnino's adaptation of André Aciman's acclaimed novel stars
Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet as lovers in sun-kissed Italy.

The Bottom Line:
Call me a successful adaptation.

by Boyd van Hoeij
12:05 AM PST 1/23/2017


Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name



PARK CITY -- There is a scene toward the end of Call Me by Your Name,  Luca Guadagnino's intimate and piercingly honest adaptation of adaptation of André Aciman's superb novel, in which a graying university professor in Italy sits down with his puffy-eyed, 17-year-old son for an unexpected talk. Dad quotes Montaigne’s famous phrase about his special friendship with Étienne de La Boetie. His son, who has been very smart academically for some time but only recently experienced an important emotional growth spurt on his way to adulthood, understands that his father is referring to his offspring’s “special friendship” with the handsome, 24-year-old intern from the U.S. who stayed with them for the summer and has just returned home.

In someone else’s hands, the exchange might have become pretentious, ridiculous or melodramatic and lachrymose, but Guadagnino, most famous for the far splashier features I Am Love  and A Bigger Splash, finds exactly the right tone for the material, which is understated and filled with paternal affection. Even viewers who aren’t able to identify the quote by Montaigne, uttered in the original French, will understand that Dad is using a common intellectual interest as a safe way to express a new idea. It is this kind of attention to detail — much of it lifted directly from the book, adapted by Guadagnino with James Ivory and editor Walter Fasano — that provides the film with its unexpectedly deep wells of emotion and surges of insight into human nature and relationships.

Starring a never-more-sensual Armie Hammer as the intern, the breathtaking Timothée Chalamet (formerly of Homeland) as the son and the great Michael Stuhlbarg as the father, this tender and minutely observed queer romance, set in bucolic Lombardy (changed from the Ligurian seaside in the novel), could, with the right marketing, become a breakout title for Sony Pictures Classics.

Professor Perlman (Stuhlbarg) is specialized in Greco-Roman sculpture and has a summer intern over every year in the family’s 17th century country palazzo. When the guest arrives, Perlman’s only child, the lanky and studious teenager Elio (Chalamet), is asked to leave his bedroom to Oliver (Hammer) and move into an adjacent storage room for the summer. Like the ritual that gives the film its title, this is not an insignificant detail, as the transfer of bedrooms already suggests that Oliver and Elio are closely connected and, to a large extent, at once interchangeable and part of a single, greater whole.

Initially, the inexperienced Elio doesn’t quite know what to make of the American seven years his senior and the feeling seems mutual. The cinematography from Thai director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Uncle Boomee…, Arabian Nights) reflects this idea, keeping everything in medium or wider shots and only rarely moving into the characters’ private spaces. The first close-up of Elio, while he intently watches Oliver dance with a girl at a village party, thus arrives as something of a shock. Perhaps even for Elio: Could he be questioning himself, wondering whether he’s jealous?

Since the action is set not only in Italy but also in 1983, this same-sex attraction would not be readily accepted, so the characters need to be eased into admitting what they might be feeling for each other. As in the scene quoted earlier, seemingly innocent elements of culture — Greek statues, medieval novels — are leveraged to discuss certain ideas that cannot be uttered out loud. In one of the film’s most daring choices, the realization that the two might be talking about the same thing is shot around a Battle of the Piave monument on a piazza in a wide shot, Elio's back toward the camera and Oliver much further back, his face barely visible. The counterintuitive choice places the two men, talking about the love that dares not speak its name, out in the open but because we can’t see their faces clearly, they could be anyone.

The camera moves in for their first kiss, however, a pastoral moment of joy that recalls the discovery of love in the countryside around Cambridge in E.M. Forster’s classic novel Maurice  (Ivory directed the film version in 1987). From that moment on, their relationship develops in fits and starts, as Oliver initially wants to “remain a good boy” and “not corrupt” Elio, but the hungry adolescent wants more. Both also have dalliances with local girls — these subplots have been heavily pruned from the novel — which here feel like ammunition in the tug-of-war between two men destined for each other. Some elegant visual shortcuts, such as the Star of David necklace that Elio starts wearing again after having discovered Oliver also has one (both are Jewish), also help condense some of the novel’s midsection.

The couple’s physical rapport is an essential part of the novel, and the film is extremely sensual, with both leads frequently walking around in just (swim) shorts during the languid summer days. The handful of sex scenes are tastefully shot but short and not particularly explicit, though Aciman’s famous peach scene — Google this at your own risk if you haven’t read the novel — is featured here in modest but unambiguous fashion. The relative discretion about the full physical compatibility of the men could potentially help the film gain a wider audience beyond the LGBTQ community, but feels a little too restrained for who these characters have become by the time they consummate their relationship.

Though Hammer might be the bigger star and he certainly has a juicier-than-usual role here that he clearly relishes, the true breakout of the film is 21-year-old Chalamet. Elio is someone who is experiencing a lot of things for the first time, for which he barely has any words, but Chalamet’s face and body language turn his character into an open book. The minutes-long and wordless final shot, another rare close-up of Elio, is so mesmerizing that it immediately cements his status as one of the world’s brightest young talents. The chemistry between the men is palpable, but what's more important, they convey their characters' complex emotions, expectations and thoughts without necessarily opening their mouths.

The rest of the small cast, very much including Stuhlbarg, in that scene mentioned at the start of this review and elsewhere, is also uniformly excellent. A minor detail that will be problematic for audiences in Europe is the mix of languages used, with the Perlmans in the film an unconvincing hodgepodge of Italian, French and American ancestry. The large amount of French dialogue can partially be explained by the fact that the film is a French co-production, though the only actor who convincingly pulls off all the languages she supposedly speaks fluently is Kurdish-Russian actress Amira Casar, who plays Mrs. Perlman.

The film’s costumes and production design nail the look of 1980s rural Italy, with Guadagnino actually having shot in and around the picturesque village [Crema, Cremona, Lombardy] where he lives. References to political life in Italy, entirely absent from the novel, are also convincing and add texture. Some classical pieces and Sufjan Stevens’ glorious score complete the all-round classy package.



Production company: Memento Films, RT, Frenesy, Water's End

Cast: Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel, Victoire Du Bois, Vanda Capriolo, Antonio Rimoldi

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Screenwriter: Luca Guadagnino, James Ivory, Walter Fasano, based on the novel by André Aciman

Producers: Peter Spears, Luca Guadagnino, Emilie Georges, Rodrigo Teixeira, Marco Morabito

Director of photography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

Production designer: Samuel Dehors

Costume designer: Giulia Piersanti

Editor: Walter Fasano

Music: Sufjan Stevens

No rating, 130 minutes

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Call Me by Your Name
Sundance 2017 Review


Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name



[EXCERPT]

PARK CITY -- There is a scene toward the end of Call Me by Your Name,  Luca Guadagnino's intimate and piercingly honest adaptation of adaptation of André Aciman's superb novel, in which a graying university professor in Italy sits down with his puffy-eyed, 17-year-old son for an unexpected talk. Dad quotes Montaigne’s famous phrase about his special friendship with Étienne de La Boetie. His son, who has been very smart academically for some time but only recently experienced an important emotional growth spurt on his way to adulthood, understands that his father is referring to his offspring’s “special friendship” with the handsome, 24-year-old intern from the U.S. who stayed with them for the summer and has just returned home.

In someone else’s hands, the exchange might have become pretentious, ridiculous or melodramatic and lachrymose, but Guadagnino, most famous for the far splashier features I Am Love  and A Bigger Splash, finds exactly the right tone for the material, which is understated and filled with paternal affection. Even viewers who aren’t able to identify the quote by Montaigne, uttered in the original French, will understand that Dad is using a common intellectual interest as a safe way to express a new idea. It is this kind of attention to detail — much of it lifted directly from the book, adapted by Guadagnino with James Ivory and editor Walter Fasano — that provides the film with its unexpectedly deep wells of emotion and surges of insight into human nature and relationships.

[....]

"Nous nous aimions parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi."

"We loved each other because it was he, because it was I."




http://www.constitution.org/la_boetie/serv_vol.htm


The Discours sur la servitude volontaire
of
ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉTIE, 1548

Rendered into English by

HARRY KURZ


[....]


Friendship of Two Men

The relationship between Montaigne and La Boétie is so impressive that their coming together seems, according to the former, to have been predestined. So irresistibly were they drawn to each other that, when they met, their earlier careers appeared as paths converging toward their union.

Michel de Montaigne succeeded his father at the court of Périgueux just before this court was merged with the one at Bordeaux. When in September, 1561, Montaigne began his judicial functions in Bordeaux, La Boétie had already served the tribunal there for eight years. It was natural for Montaigne, who was two years younger, to look up to the colleague whose tract on Voluntary Servitude he had already read in manuscript. In his essay on Friendship [5] he tells us of his feeling: "If I am urged to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be put into words; there is beyond any observation of mine a mysterious, inexplicable and predestined force in this union. We sought each other before we had met through reports each had heard about the other, which attracted our affections more singularly than the nature of the situation can suggest. I believe it was some dispensation from Heaven. When we met we embraced each other as soon as we heard the other's name.... We found we were so captivated, so revealed to each other, so drawn together, that nothing ever since has been closer than one to the other."

In various Latin epistles addressed to his friend, La Boétie pays similar tribute. And even in the essay on Voluntary Servitude, written before they met, we get a glimpse of what friendship could mean to a man whose spirit habitually dwelt on a high plane of integrity. Thereafter, these two made a perfect exchange of exalted love in a relationship for which their joined names have become a symbol. It is small wonder then that Montaigne will add to his immortal essay, some twenty-five years after the death of his friend, his sad but beautiful conclusion to the ineffable nature of their friendship: "We loved each other because it was he, because it was I." There is nothing left to say.

We can begin to understand what the loss of such a friend meant to Montaigne. During the earlier years of mourning he languishes. Pleasure revives his pain for he wants his friend to share it at his side. His work at the court of Bordeaux becomes distasteful and he finally gives up his post to dedicate himself to his departed friend and to perpetuate his memory. First he prepares for publication all the manuscripts left him by La Boétie.[6] Very gradually he welcomes solitude and gives himself to the slow elaboration of his own sagacious essays.

It is to the honor of Montaigne that all his life he showed his gratitude for this unique friend bestowed upon him; and it is to the glory of La Boétie that he fully deserved the immortality into which their two names are forever fused by love.

[....]

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf_fqIFv8AM&t=103s[/youtube]
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017)
Interview with
Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet
at the Berlin Film Festival

Published on Feb 15, 2017

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frvmC2edkkU[/youtube]
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017)
Interview with
Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet
at the Berlin Film Festival

Published on Feb 16, 2017

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Re Call Me by Your Name, Armie Hammer specifically mentions Brokeback Mountain  (and Art as "a change agent") at 3:00 - 3:34

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4Y2EpDXwZo[/youtube]
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017)
Interview with
Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet,
Luca Guadagnino & Michael Stuhlbarg
at the Sundance Film Festival

Uploaded Apr 10, 2017

http://variety.com/video/armie-hammer-gay-drama-call-me-by-your-name-kiss-scene-sundance/

Armie Hammer: ‘Call Me by Your Name’s’ First Kiss Scene Felt ‘Organic and Special’

Director Luca Guadagnino and stars Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, and Michael Stuhlbarg discussed their gay love story “Call Me by Your Name,” and how art can be an agent of change.

“The shooting of the actual scene of the first kiss — it felt as organic and special and great as every other shot that we did on this movie,” Hammer said, adding that he hopes we’ve evolved sociologically since “Brokeback Mountain” was released to controversy in 2005 to see “the truth that’s present in every moment of desire.”

The foursome were at the Variety Studio, presented by Orville Redenbacher’s, at the Sundance Film Festival.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

 

Omg!!!  

As per Ringling tradition, David and Bravo created parody movie posters for the film. Beth David and Esteban Bravo

 

[southendmd]

Thank you, John, for posting all this!  How wonderful.

I recently re-read the book while on vacation.  I liked even better the second time.

It's such a first-person narrative, I wonder how it will translate to film.  Is there a voice-over? So much of the story takes place in Elio's mind.

So, they "sort of" did the peach scene?  I can't imagine how that will go...

Sad that the film is not set at the sea, as the novel is.

Later!

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Thank you, John, for posting all this!  How wonderful.

I recently re-read the book while on vacation.  I liked even better the second time.

It's such a first-person narrative, I wonder how it will translate to film.  Is there a voice-over? So much of the story takes place in Elio's mind.

So, they "sort of" did the peach scene?  I can't imagine how that will go...

Sad that the film is not set at the sea, as the novel is.

Later!

Yes, Paul, many changes--but I was so insanely in love with Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love  (which was just as stylishly gorgeous as Tom Ford's A Single Man,  if not more so), I'm completely happy!

FYI, there are at least snippets of the original (or one version of) James Ivory's screenplay on line--in which the main 1988 story (rather than Guadagnino's 1982-3 reset) was in winter.

Winter??  Hello? Not many swim trunks and flying shirttails in--Sicily?? Really? (Siicily in winter is COLD and DAMP.) Also--Oliver was to have been played by--Shia LaBeouf?? Oh Lord NO! Must have been in the same alternate reality in which Jack Twist was played by--Matt Damon. (Major compensation in that same alternate reality was Gore won in 2000 and Hilary won in 2016.)

Another change from the book: no further meetings between Elio and Oliver in later years; the movie is set in one summer only.

Anyway, counting the days for an Italian (Crema) Summer in November!

Later!

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

"Waiting for the Guadagnino movie with Ivory's screenplay."

 @vitoluperto
http://www.imgrum.org/user/vitoluperto/3232156464

Aspettando il film di Guadagnino con la sceneggiatura di Ivory
#chiamamicoltuonome  #andréaciman  #librodellestate  #callmebyyourname  
#lucaguadagnino  #jamesivory  #crescelattesa  #gayromance

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

   

   

 @ARMIE_ARMY
http://www.imgrum.org/user/armie_army/5319356955
http://www.imgrum.org/tag/callmebyyourname

CALLMEBYYOURNAME
#armiehammer  #timothéechalamet  #cmbyn  

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

So, they "sort of" did the peach scene?  I can't imagine how that will go...
Later!

http://www.mynewplaidpants.com/2016/06/peach-of-day.html
http://www.mynewplaidpants.com/

CALLMEBYYOURNAME
#armiehammer  #timothéechalamet  #cmbyn  

Fans of the book might be worried about the removal of the memorable peach scene from the novel. Even though Guadagnino called the scene “legendary” in the book, he was unsure if it would fit in the adaptation.

“[It] struck me so much as un-filmable, but also, I hate to be defined as coy,” he said. “I don’t want to be coy, shy or coward. So it was like, let’s take the bull by the horns and shoot it. They went for it “on a day that was endless because we were running late, [after we] shot 13 or 14 hours.”

http://www.newnownext.com/call-me-by-your-name-movie-sex-scenes/08/2017/