Luca Guadagnino directs this most beautifully sensitive and romantic film of the year…about two lovers in the summer of 1983.
Elio (Timothee Chalamet) is seventeen, smart, and with a physique as stick-straight as his life. He’s bored, so he reads book after book, and lazily mumbles several languages. He’s a know-it-all child prodigy about to have his summer holiday turned upside down, with his parents ‘somewhere in northern Italy.’ Picturesque paradise, cobblestones and glistening water, suffused in the suggestion of romance and naughty potential.
Oliver (Arnie Hammer) arrives as assistant to Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Professor in archaeology. Elio’s mother, Annelle (Amira Casar) portrays a stunning woman who lounges at the veranda table nibbling on the required cheese, olives and sipping fine wine. She also observes her son Elio’s awkwardness.
Elio is at that tender teenager age. Out-going Italian girls surround him. Summer love is anticipated. Yet, Elio can only stare at the Star of David on Oliver’s neck. He can only steal glances of Oliver’s peeping chest hairs; his taut and tanned physique. The two share a bathroom that adjoins their bedrooms. This is only the beginning…
Oliver massages a kink in Elio’s shoulder subtle-like, in many-a-moment that will make us stir. The perfectly intensifying soundtrack knows too, when to dip in and raise Elio’s senses. And, ours.
Elio strums his guitar, and sucks the nectar of a peach (and its fuzz) freshly plucked from a tree. All suggestions of Elio’s growing discoveries both externally and internally. Soon we’re on high sexual alert. We know where this is going, but we never expect this coming-of-age love story to land with such tenderness.
Based on the Andre Aciman novel of the same title, James Ivory (director of A Room With a View) delivers a rsweeping journey of a screenplay in a somehow contained format.
Hammer pulls his role off with flawless finesse. The right dose of unbuttoned shirt, cockiness, and Kennedy-esque summer swagger, along with the lack of urgency, and the self-assuredness. A bronzed God not dissimilar from the very classic statues he’s studying in his research. For a moment, memories of Jude Law’s breakout performance in The Talented Mister Ripley surfaces. Except Hammer is beautiful inside and out (as compared to Law’s defiance and motivations). Hammer is genuine to his internal and external sexuality. It’s not a fault, or a gimmick, it’s his way of life. He’s beautiful. He embraces it.
Chalamat is the perfect match for Hammer, his performance vulnerable and confident, certain what he wants, worried about getting it. Whether he does or not remains to be seen, but together the two men, show us the meaning of Call Me By Your Name separate in personality, but one in the same.
A later scene of Elio and his dad is the most forgiving and insightful moment of any father and son ever witnessed. Stuhlbarg speaks as an old, tired but wise man full of dignity and humility.
For any homosexual man in confusing times, this coming-of-age tale will leave you teary-eyed with first love memories…and more importantly assured that this is how it’s supposed to feel. In a time of the LGBT movement, there has never been a film so necessary to address that love is love is love.
There won’t be a dry eye in the house at its ending. Summer has a season, afterall, and all things must end.