Ronald Tiersky
December 2017
Film critique
“Call me by your name” (2017)
“Call me by your name” is a new film by the Italian director Luca Guadagnino, an indie or art movie in limited release (only three theaters in Manhattan) even though it has received extraordinary critical acclaim and many international and American awards from its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, then the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute, as well as the Golden Globe Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
The plot involves a summer homosexual relationship between a 24-year-old man and a 17-year-old teenager. Despite what some reviews say, it’s not a “gay film,” however. Impassioned sensuality, long embraces and kisses but no frontal nudity and no graphic depiction of homosexual acts. It’s a love story of mutual attraction, a period of flirtation and courtship, consummation. A relationship that lasts several weeks whose memory will last a lifetime.
Such a subject is a hard sell in America at this moment in our cultural history, a moment of obsession with light, heavy and criminal sexual harassment, of hard reckoning for perpetrators, a coming out of victims and anguished worries across the land about what is permissible behavior between men and women. “Call me by your name” is at once totally out of place and time in this country, and a reminder of other places and other times.
The story takes place in northern Italy near the town of Crema in Lombardy in 1983. The setting is an imposing, classically bourgeois villa in the nearby countryside, the summer home of a highly-cultured, academic-intellectual Italian- Jewish family that evidently has lived in the U.S. That the family is Jewish seems irrelevant, other than it is the only Jewish family in town. The point might be that its multilingual, multi-talented, sophisticated life suggests Jewish liberal cosmopolitanism amidst a typically Italian provincialism. In any case, it’s a gorgeous setting and the summer’s elegance reminds anyone who has had such an experience what civilized summer living can be in a country like Italy. There are no murders or special effects, just peach trees ripe with fruit, a passion for books and music (an extraordinary musical score), and a sentimental education.
Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) is the 17-year-old whose father is a professor of archaeology and his mother an urbane, worldly woman. Each summer a graduate student is invited to the villa as an assistant to the professor. This summer that student is Oliver (Armie Hammer), 24 years old, a Columbia University Ph.D. candidate, also Jewish, improbably handsome with a face and smile reminiscent of Robert Redford in his prime.
The summer ended, the affair is over. Oliver must return to the States and his Ph.D. work, while Elio, his life transfigured by this experience of a few weeks, is bereft. The surprise is that Oliver is bereft as well. They part achingly at the train station, and Elio, sobbing, calls his mother to come take him home. The last shot is an extended close-up, perhaps a full minute, of Elio sitting before a fire in the chimney, his expression changing gradually from grief to a despite-everything smile to tears at what has happened to him. What has happened to him is an education—a deeply bittersweet first experience in love. That his lover is a man complicates things, but the deepest thing is love.
Elio’s parents intuited that their son had been taken up in a totally unexpected, wild, sensual affair; of course, they must also deal with the fact of its homosexuality. Here’s the un-American moment. Their reaction is tender, nurturing, happy for his experience and understanding of his grief at Oliver’s departure. Elio’s father, in a poignant conversation, tells his son of the happiness he himself feels for the happiness that this love has brought. He tells Elio, hoping he’s ‘not speaking out of turn,’ about his own regret when, in a like situation as a younger man, he had not had the courage to do what Elio did.
Several months later Oliver calls the family, Elio on one phone, his parents on another. Oliver announces to all that he’s getting married (to a woman if it needs to be said). There’s a lot of congratulations and the parents discreetly hang up so that Oliver and Elio can speak freely. Their passion immediately resurges. Oliver tells Elio that he ‘remembers everything.’ Each, recalling their habit, calls the other by the other’s name (thus the film’s title), a sign of their connection, their unity, two-made-one. In their earlier conversation Elio’s father had quoted Montaigne, “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” It happened because it was him, because it was me. That’s life.
Were they gay? Theirs was a devoted homosexual relationship, though it lasted only a few weeks. Now, Oliver was getting married. During their summer passion each also had heterosexual encounters. Director Luca Guadagnino told an interviewer that, if a planned sequel is made, “Elio probably wouldn’t be gay…I don’t think Elio is necessarily going to become a gay man. He hasn’t found his place yet. I can tell you that I believe that he would start an intense relationship with (his girlfriend) again.”
Is this confusing? I don’t think so. But in late 2017 American culture such a situation and motives are unfathomable, alien. About the plot, one older actor tweeted, “24-year-old man, 17-year-old boy. Stop.” Armie Hammer, that is, Oliver, responded with his own tweet: “Didn’t you date a 19-year-old when you were 60...?”
That’s where the culture is at this moment, including the demeaning weapon known as Twitter.
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