forum_C: „Call Me By Your Name“ by Luca Guadagnino ★★★★☆

Elio Perlman, a 17 year old precocious young man played masterfully by Timothée Chalamet, looks out of the window and sees Oliver, who looks like a text book ancient Greek beauty. Oliver (Armie Hammer who is often type-cast as merely a handsome man, provides a career defining performance), is Elio’s father’s guest. Each year, Mr. Perlman,  a classics professor, hosts a graduate student as a sort of summer school.

Whereas it would be easy to summarise Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name as the story of two young men who fall in love in the summer of 1983 in Italy, it is not simply a gay coming-of-age story. The film does not explicitly reference the beginning of the AIDS crisis, but an educated spectator of course understands the sub-text of homosexuality during the 1980s. Indeed, the film goes beyond the idea that had both characters lived in a more “progressive” society it would all have been different, and they could have been more open about their relationship.

Call Me By Your Name directed by Luca Guadagnino is an adaptation from André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name. It isn’t Guadagnino’s first film about love, but it may be the one that stays with you.

Adapting a novel to film can seem like a bad idea, but Guadagnino manages to enhance the book (with the help of screenwriter James Ivory) as he uses the medium of film to convey feelings when words are no longer enough. Ivory, who has been nominated and also won many awards for his adaption, has managed to translate pages of the inner monologue of the book’s narrator Elio into key movements and dialogue. Guadagnino beautifully captures this through camera movements and mise-en-scène. Everything seems to flow in the mise-en-scene. Shot in 35mm on location, the grain allows for the subdued colours of an Italian summer to melt into one. The film also merges the bodies of the two main protagonists, Elio and Oliver, either by physically intertwining their bodies or having them layered through shot depth. Throughout the entire film, the recurring elements of fluids (bodily, waterfalls, lakes, apricot juice, fountains, etc.) bathe the film in longing, sexual tension and desire. What’s more, the film’s beautiful soundtrack – a perfect mix of 80s pop, classical music and the powerful songs by Sufjan Stevens, of which two were purposefully commissioned for the film, keeps interjecting and pausing the narrative for a few seconds until releasing it back into its stream.

The film merges the bodies of Elio and Oliver © Memento Films

It is, however, Elio’s parents, Annella and Mr. Perlman, played by Amira Casar and Michael Stuhlbarg, who carry so much meaning in and outside of the film. Elio has two important interactions with his parents, which reveals that the movie is not only about big love between the main characters as it would seem, but also, and perhaps most importantly, about unconditional love. Yes, Call Me By Your Name is about the love that forever changes a person, but its grander tale is the unconditional love you experience from Elio’s parents.

The film’s action picks up after Elio’s mother reads from Marguerite de Navarre 16th century romance “The Heptaméron,“ in which the main character asks “Is it better to speak or to die?”. The book’s character chooses not to speak, but Elio does, making it very hard for Oliver.

The second interaction, which comes toward the end of the film, is Michael Stuhlbarg’s monologue. It becomes clear that, not only have the parents always known about their son’s homosexuality, or at least suspected it, but also that his talk is not only meant for Elio but for all of us. In life there is nothing bigger, more important and oddly tangible than love. It may not be immediate, but when it comes down to it, Call Me By Your Name is as much about sexual awakenings, lust and growing pains, as about the love of a parent for their child.

Oliver and Elio with Elio’s parents © Memento Films

No parent wants to see their child suffer, therefore encouraging your child to love as freely and openly as possible despite the chances of being hurt is what seems to be the film’s message. As Aciman wrote and Stuhlbarg so eloquently renders: “Right now, there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it, and with it the joy you’ve felt. [.. ] But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!”

Call Me By Your Name haunts and drags you into a narrative that you know will not necessarily end well, not because of something tragic, but because eventually summer will be over.

Call Me By Your Name is out now at Utopia.