Director: Luca Guadagnino
Date: 13 November 2017
jamesintexas rating: ****
Mr. Perlman, Michael Stuhlbarg's character, has a monologue at the end of this marvelous new film that detonated with an unexpected emotionality in me and resulted in a richer appreciation for all that came before. Without revealing the contents of his epiphany, Perlman's naked honesty and perceptiveness expose the raw nerves of the film. I cannot remember being caught off-guard by such a transcendent and riveting moment in cinema in recent years.
Call Me by Your Name is a burgeoning love story, a collision of cultures between a seventeen year old Elio Perlman (Timothee Chalamet) who is staying with his academic parents in a remote Italian paradise for the summer, the land of apricots and peaches and swimming, and "the usurper," Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate assistant of sorts who lives with them for six weeks and helps his father catalogue his work. It is 1983, Elio has lots of time on his hands, to play piano and read, to meander the Italian countryside, to spend with possible love Marzia (Esther Garrel), but he is magnetically drawn to Oliver, with his towering frame, his clipped way of speaking, and his marvelous intellect (watching him correct Mr. Perlman is one of the film's many delights; them mocking his speech habits, another). Hammer's work here is sublime, making Oliver both overtly powerful and hypnotic while also private and secretive. And his cutting loose on the dance floor to the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way" at two crucial moments in the film is both mesmerizing and cathartic. As the summer drips away, the two circle around each other, tentatively negotiating their growing feelings all set amidst a backdrop of beautiful lagoons and cisterns, gorgeous bicycle rides through the countryside, and meals around parents and neighbors. Where the film goes is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and the telling of the story was compelling in the way love works its way to and through Elio. It reminded me of falling in love and all that entails. The film imposes no artificial plotting or conflict other than time and its devastating ephemerality.
Director Luca Guadagnino is a new name to me, and I have never seen a film by him before, but now I want to more than anything. Guadagnino surprised me multiple times in multiple ways in this film: with his abrupt editing choices, mid-scene and mid-song sometimes that shift the chapters of the film forward; with his showing of the film frames at key moments, making the film more about memory and the past in its very tactile nature; in its final shot which lingers, painfully and truthfully after an epiphany of sorts is made. I am grateful to have seen this film as part of the 2017 Houston Cinema Arts Festival, and the introduction to the film gave us a tantalizing morsel to chew on about a future film by this director. I do not think the indicators of genre (drama, romance) or plot key words (gay relationship, teenage boy, lgbt, first love) do this powerful film justice. I think about the role the parents play in the film, hungering for more from Mrs. Perlman (Amira Cassar), especially in a car ride scene fraught with raw emotion. Her character, for whatever reason, seems confined to glances and looks and movements behind the scene, while Mr. Perlman gets the weighty, prescient, and elegiac monologue at the end of the film that still haunts me.
I want to immediately return to the world of Call Me by Your Name now, read the book the film is based upon by author Andre Aciman, and in a second viewing, I want to appreciate even more the quiet, understated work of Chalamet and even the actors playing his parents, as there is simply more to consider (as there always is) when love shakes you to your core. As the Psychedelic Furs sing, "Love my way, it's a new road / I follow where my mind goes," and dance like Armie Hammer in 1983.
It is the best film of the year.
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