I can't remember a film that better captures that kind of madness and heightened attention to not just the object of desire but also the world at large. Nor can I recall a movie that more directly appeals to all of the audience's senses to make them feel what's happening onscreen. It's undoubtedly a gay love story, though it's less about coming out than coming of age. Call Me by Your Name is a lush, heady experience for the body, but it's also an arousal for the soul. That scene is the kind of small wonder that Call Me By Your Name is made from, all the more impressive for being so seamlessly fused to an overall, unified vision. That isn't to say that the film's impact is primarily academic.
Indeed, Guadagnino's roving eye feels dictated less by precise semiotics , than by an intuitive, purely emotional tenor. Buoyed by a rhapsodic, largely classical-key-driven score, the camera moves with coruscating energy, floating about with a freewheeling sense of wonder, impelled by a search for the ineffable, the sublime. What this creates in Call Me By Your Name is a very particular sense of time, the lassitude of summer lending itself fully to temporal expansion. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, the new film by Luca Guadagnino, is a sensual and transcendent tale of first love, based on the acclaimed novel by Andre Aciman. It's the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, and Elio Perlman , a precocious 17- year-old American-Italian boy, spends his days in his family's 17th century villa transcribing and playing classical music, reading, and flirting with his friend Marzia . Elio enjoys a close relationship with his father , an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture, and his mother Annella , a translator, who favor him with the fruits of high culture in a setting that overflows wit h natural delights.
While Elio's sophistication and intellectual gifts suggest he is already a fully-fledged adult, there is much that yet remains innocent and unformed about him, particularly about matters of the heart. One day, Oliver , a charming American scholar working on his doctorate, arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of the setting, Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will alter their lives forever. Costume designer Giulia Piersanti avoided using period costumes; instead, she wanted to provide "a sense of insouciant adolescent sensuality, summer heat and sexual awakening" to the characters.
The costumes, which were influenced by the French films Pauline at the Beach , A Tale of Springtime and A Summer's Tale , included some pieces made by Piersanti's team. For the Perlmans' wardrobe, Piersanti took inspiration from her parents' photograph albums. For Oliver's "sexy, healthy American" image, Piersanti referred to "some of Bruce Weber's earliest photographs". Oliver's clothes change throughout the film as "he's more able to free himself". Aiming to emphasize Elio's confident style, she chose several Lacoste costumes and a distinctive, New Romantic-looking shirt in the final scene.
For Elio's other costumes, Piersanti picked some items from her husband's closet, including the polo shirt and Fido Dido T-shirt. One of the most interesting aspects of a fly's life, at least narratively speaking, is just how short it is. Their cousins, the mayflies, get just a few minutes. This impermanence has inspired artwork from the Dutch vanitas tradition of the early 17th century to the contemporary podcast The Heart, which produced a mayfly-inspired three-part episode called One Day's Love. "The mayfly sneaks in through an open window and lives her mayfly life to the fullest—perhaps even finding her true mayfly love," the short post accompanying the first episode reads.
She lies limply in the windowsill." I choose to believe that Guadagnino was using these annoying little insects to remind us that no matter how badly the audience or Elio wanted it, his romance with Oliver would always be ephemeral. And sometimes, the list of summer's casualties includes you. [It didn't necessarily] inspire me, because there's nothing in the book that is from the film. What the response of the audience to the film did was basically tell me I was okay, I was on the right path. I was not a crazy man writing about peaches and weird, weird people. These were lovely people, and it made me feel like I created something that makes sense.
What the response to the film, and to the previous novel, did was it just legitimized. But I couldn't feel inspired by what people were saying. Everybody was asking me—you have no idea how many e-mails I get—"Please write the story from the point of view of the father, or from the point of view of Oliver. Please tell us what happened." I can't think that way.
Similar to their personal talents, Elio and Oliver often use their sexuality as a means of self-expression while vying for each other's attentions. WhileCall Me By Your Nametells the story of a gay romance, it isn't explicitly a homosexual movie. Elio and Oliver could more accurately be described as bisexual or pansexual, attracted to men and women alike. And at the outset of the film, both of them are engaged in passionate flings with local female characters. Elio is involved with a sweet girl named Marzia, while Oliver takes a liking to young bombshell Chiara.
Both characters seem eager to flaunt their heterosexual tendencies around one another, as though gauging what the other thinks about it. These loves, whether or not they are actualized through words or some physical act, stick with us for the rest of our lives. The story of Elio and Oliver is a visceral experience that harks back to a love we don't want to forget. So many return to this story - this world - because Elio and Oliver and Marzia and the Perlmans are versions of us and people we know. The film and book seduce us into lush, sensuous fiction that is safe and accepting of our most shameful of desires. It tells us that it is okay to meditate and churn over the most tempestuous of feelings, even when they don't make sense to us.
Before and during filming, the actors lived in Crema and were able to experience small-town life. Guadagnino engaged with the cast and filmmakers and often cooked for them and showed films at his house. Hammer and Chalamet, who did not have to do a screen test together, met for the first time during production in Crema. Before filming began, they spent a month together, watching TV and going to local restaurants.
"We'd hang out with each other all the time, because we were pretty much the only Americans there, and we were able to defend one another and really get to know one another," Chalamet said. During the first two days of production, Guadagnino read the script with the cast. The first scene that Hammer and Chalamet rehearsed was the kissing scene, and they spent several days filming nude. "I've never been so intimately involved with a director before. Luca was able to look at me and completely undress me," Hammer said. The miraculous nature of the story stems not only from Elio and Oliver overcoming their fears, but also from the way the obstacles they face simply vanish—because, we later learn, those obstacles were illusory for them.
In the monologue Elio's father gives toward the end of the film, forbidden love is made okay, even encouraged. More than that, Mr. Perlman's confession—that he has wanted, but never had, the kind of relationship his son has enjoyed—marks the moment when Call Me by Your Name telescopes out. An intimate, specific story must be considered against the larger circumstances that queer people faced. In that context, it becomes a tale, more broadly, of liberation—and perhaps its limits. The movie has basically validated that particular approach.
And I have to say that I can see that this is equally a valid approach to the father's speech. The father may have been attracted to men or not, we don't know from the book. So when he splits with his wife, he's not splitting because he has homosexual tendencies, but simply because something must have gone wrong in their marriage. I think at that point in his life, he is resigned, and suddenly he has this upsurge of passion because someone just manages to stir him up. Call Me By Your Name is a beautiful film for many reasons…the cinematography, the locale, the acting, the directing, and of course the screenplay come together for a wonderful and touching experience. I was struck by just how much James Ivory was able to convey in so short a time frame , seamlessly weaving multiple complex themes and emotions together in a simple story that speaks volumes beyond its means.
And I think Ivory's age is telling as well…at the tender age of 90, he is the oldest Oscar winner of all time. 25Interspersed with all of this is Elio's journaling. He occasionally shares his thoughts on Oliver and how he's trying to win his attention, sometimes expressing doubt or regret over how he is doing so.Did I act too harsh or nonchalant at this moment? The tension of the first act is very much rooted in the awkwardness of young love, in the guessing-game of knowing when to show vulnerability and when to shield yourself from harm.
We don't need arbitrary obstacles between them to feel longing for these two people to get together…the simple dance of flirting and courtship is enough to drive the plot forward. Reaction to the advertisement on social media was somewhat negative, largely because of Sony Pictures' misleading use of an image of Chalamet and Garrel instead of a focus on the protagonists' relationship. Daniel Megarry of Gay Times described it as "an attempt to 'straight-wash' the movie's predominant same-sex romance". Benjamin Lee of The Guardian called the ad a "disastrous attempt to push Oscar-buzzed Call Me by Your Name as a straight love story", and said the advert "belies an industry awkwardly denying queerness".
What Is Meaning Of Call Me By Your Name Sony Pictures Classics later aired several commercial spots to promote the film during its U.S.-wide expansion on January 19, 2018. To promote the film in South Korea, Sony Pictures released several never-before-seen set photos and pastel promotional posters illustrated by Son Eunkyoung in March 2018. Guadagnino selected the music for Call Me by Your Name himself. He wanted to find an "emotional narrator to the film" through music, in a "less heavy, less present, and more enveloping" way than voice and text. The films Barry Lyndon , The Magnificent Ambersons , and The Age of Innocence inspired him. Guadagnino wanted the film's music to be connected to Elio, a young pianist who enjoys transcribing and adapting piano pieces and uses music to deepen his relationship with Oliver.
Music is used in the film to reflect the period setting, the characters' family life and their level of education, and "the kind of canon they would be a part of". Guadagnino also researched which pop songs had been played frequently on local radio stations that summer. Guadagnino shot the film in chronological order, which allowed the filmmakers to "witness the onscreen maturity of both protagonist and actor", according to Fasano. The scene in which Mr. Perlman delivers an emotional speech to Elio was filmed on the penultimate day of filming. Stuhlbarg spent months preparing for the scene, which Guadagnino wanted to make "as simple as possible" by shooting fewer takes and "let the actors be." The scene took three takes to film and Stuhlbarg was "on three different levels of getting emotional".
Garrel enjoyed filming her sex scene with Chalamet, which she described as filled with "joy and simplicity". Chalamet was listening to "Visions of Gideon", one of the original songs written by Sufjan Stevens for the film, in an earpiece while filming the final sequence; the director asked him to perform three variations of the scene, one per take. The camera was set in the fireplace with nobody behind it. "It was bit of an acting experiment," Chalamet said. During this scene, the title of the film was shown for the first time, rather than in the opening sequence. The common Jewish identity is a part of what draws Elio and Oliver together and is represented visually on screen through the Star of David necklace that Oliver initially wears and Elio is drawn to.
There is a hint in the movie that Oliver might have gifted his own Star of David necklace to Elio shortly before they parted ways in the train station. Elio's own necklace can be clearly seen during the conversation from which the movie borrows its title thanks to its visually central placement during this scene. But Aciman says that Find Me, coming Oct. 29, is not an "obvious sequel." In an exclusive interview with TIME, the author explains why he chose to enter the story not through Elio or Oliver but instead through Elio's father Samuel. Find Me does not simply continue where Call Me By Your Name left off — the new book's dialogue-heavy vignettes fill in gaps left in the final chapter of the original, which flashed forward into brief scenes of the 20 years after Elio and Oliver's intimate summer.
A book that muses on big themes of love, fate and the effects of time, Find Me provides a lot to discover between the lines. Aciman answered all our biggest questions about the Call Me By Your Name sequel. His dalliances with a longtime girlfriend Marzia , halting and ill-defined, are emblematic in that regard. But Oliver's presence—his massive, sculptural physicality and particularly American arrogance—alters the dynamic, inciting in Elio a jealousy that, for a while, he's hard-pressed to pin down. When Oliver dances with a mutual female friend at an outdoor club, Elio's barely suppressed ire is clear enough, but at whom is it directed? I'm not suggesting that the movie telegraphs Elio's future as one of sickness (Guadagnino has talked about filming sequels that follow these characters years later, Before Sunset–style, and the book closes with a series of flash-forwards).
The critic Eric Eidelstein persuasively argues that the film's flies and blood could be red herrings, subverting the cliché of the ill-fated gay romance. But the flip side of that subversion is an understanding that prejudice is not the only reason gay people have, so often, been saddled with tragic stories in pop culture. It is an understanding that the year's other splashy European queer film, 120 Beats Per Minute, about AIDS activism in Paris in the early '90s, need not be seen as a foil to Call Me by Your Name but as a companion piece. Self-actualization—or simply loving as one wants—was not the entire struggle. Most of the reception for the movie emphasized its devastating and candid love story, with considerable criticism involving the age gap between the two male lovers. The music video does something similar with classical iconography.
The opening sequence, set in the Garden of Eden, features Roman and Greek architecture. Later on, statues jeer at Lil Nas X from the stands of a Roman amphitheater. Although the song has received bad faith criticism for its use of sexualized biblical and Satanic imagery, the integration of angels and demons builds upon the symbols established by the 2017 movie.
By combining biblical figures, Roman and Greek iconography and a homoerotic narrative, the directors of the music video — Tanu Muino and Lil Nas X himself — harmonize symbols of the LGBTQ+ experience. Oliver, played by Armie Hammer, displays no such obviously introverted predispositions. He is gregarious, at times arrogant, and often filmed from below to the effect that he appears statuesque. Consequently, the initial set-up of the two lovers' relationship is one of antagonism—they are radically, seemingly irreconcilably, different.
When Oliver squeezes Elio's shoulder in this volleyball scene, he baulks, and the interaction plunges Elio into moody angst for the rest of the day. Yet from this point onwards, these two seemingly incompatible egos end up merging to the extent that they literally swap names. It is in parallel along this axis, I would argue, that this film's relationship with transcription shifts. By contrast, the pacing of the third act is intentionally rushed.
Whereas for the first two acts the plot meanders and our characters laze around scenic Italy, there's a greater sense of urgency in the final chapter as Elio and Oliver try to cram in as much of a relationship that they can while they still have the chance. Elio and Oliver don't consummate their love until pg. 58, and their whirlwind romance only lasts a mere 13 pages before Oliver is gone for good. It's a bittersweet realization that the relationship we've been building towards for so long will be so short-lived, a realization that Elio himself undergoes. There's an underlying feeling of regret at wasted time, as both characters know they could have been together longer if they'd just gotten over themselves at the start.
The first two-thirds of the film is deliberately meandering and lazy. Not only does this give us time to drink in the beautiful scenery of northern Italy, it captures the nonchalant mood of teen summer vacation, free of worry or sorrow. Our characters are unattached and carefree; the passage of time does not concern them in the slightest, not yet old enough to understand how short and fleeting life truly is. In fact, some of the key moments of the film are prolonged to highlight this.
Elio and Oliver's flirting persists for pages and pages, a constant dance of will-they-won't they. Even when they resolve to get together, we are forced to spend an agonizingly-long day in their shoes, waiting for the moment of intimacy to come, constantly checking the time like Elio. Ivory wants to relate the notion that, when our lives are carefree and boundless, time can slow to a crawl and every moment lingers on.
Sometimes labels are crucial in forming strategic political alliances. But it's worth noting that in a recent poll, over half of the young adults surveyed saw themselves not as "homosexual" or "heterosexual", but as "something other than straight". And Elio and Oliver don't see the biological sex of their love object as constitutive of their identity. Both the film and the novel make it clear that they each have had relationships with women as well as men. "If I paired the age of Elio in the film with the age of Timothée, in three years' time, Timothée will be 25, as would Elio by the time the second story was set", he said.
In the novel, Elio and Oliver reunite 15 years later when Oliver is married. Guadagnino said that in the sequel, "I don't think Elio is necessarily going to become a gay man. He hasn't found his place yet ... I believe that he would start an intense relationship with Marzia again." Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Boyd van Hoeij described Call Me by Your Name as an "extremely sensual ... intimate and piercingly honest" adaptation of Aciman's novel and called Chalamet's performance "the true breakout of the film". Peter Debruge of Variety believed the film "advances the canon of gay cinema" by portraying "a story of first love ... that transcends the same-sex dynamic of its central couple". He compared Guadagnino's "sensual" direction with the films of Pedro Almodóvar and François Ozon, and put Call Me by Your Name "on par with the best of their work".
David Ehrlich of IndieWire also praised Guadagnino's directing, which he said helped the film "match the artistry and empathy" of Carol and Moonlight . Sam Adams of the BBC wrote that Stuhlbarg's performance "puts a frame around the movie's painting and opens up avenues we may not have thought to explore", and called it "one of his finest" to date. He extolled the film as one of "many movies that have so successfully appealed to both the intellectual and the erotic since the heydays of Patrice Chéreau and André Téchiné". Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who had previously collaborated with Guadagnino on Ferdinando Cito Filomarino's Antonia , served as the director of photography. He had read Aciman's novel before receiving the script and walked around filming locations to "get a feeling for everything ... to see the color, to see how the light changed during the day, and input it into my data".