Call Me by Your Name

seen on 5 January 2018

This is the third of director Luca Guadagnino's films about aspects of love and desire. It is based on a novel by André Aciman about the relationship between the 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and the 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate student working with Elio's father (an archaeologist and classicist) and staying with the family in Italy during the summer of 1983. The film is shot in Guadagnino's home region (not, apparently, the setting of the novel).

At first Elio is wary of Oliver, resenting his laid-back American manner, while Oliver is bemused by Elio's prickliness as much as by his precocious knowledge - typically, the teenager is an expert in anything that really interests him and is not particularly shy of showing up the young man's ignorance. But eventually the attraction between the two becomes stronger, and romance blossoms.

The subject matter is potentially awkward, but the treatment is unfussy and non-judgemental, with no hint of homophobia and no real sense of exploitation (Oliver's reservations on this point are blithely dismissed by Elio). Elio's parents seem unworried, even approving of the special friendship between their son and the visitor, and none of the other people in their lives is shown to be in a position to have a real opinion about what is going on. To that extent, the film is perhaps unrealistic.

However, in its own terms, it is a beautifully composed evocation of the first awakening of passionate love in a sensitive teenager - the performance by Chalamet is both charming and intense, catching the precocity and the vulnerability of a youngster in equal measure. The summer attractiveness of Italy - even of a region not especially well-known to the general viewer - provides a marvellous backdrop for the slow development of the relationship in a milieu where everyone seems to have all the time in the world for such things.  Elio's experience is bound to be transitory and therefore painful - Oliver only visits for one summer - and yet he is blessed with a father (Michael Stuhlbarg) who seeks to impart sympathetic wisdom where many parents would have been either at a complete loss, or just appalled.

It's a great film about its subject, worthily complimenting the first film of the (loose) trilogy, I am Love (from 2009). I can't speak of the second film, A Bigger Splash (2015) as I have not seen it.