Call Me by Your Name

Directed By: Luca GuadagninoWritten By: James Ivory (based on the novel Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman)Starring: Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar

Few films have ever taken their

time as effectively as Call Me by Your Name, the latest from Italian director Luca Guadagnino–  a masterwork guaranteed to enrapture audiences in fits of seduction and intimacy, before leaving them crumpled on the floor,enlightened, but aching.

In it, Timothee Chalamet plays a soon to be lovelorn seventeen-year-old named Elio Perlman, a precocious, confident, intellectual (occasionally smart-ass) type with a prodigious talent for music and who seems to know a great deal about a great many things, except himself.

Elio spends his summers in Northern Italy with his parents, doing what he can to keep busy—playing piano, playing guitar, reading, bicycling through town, often just waiting for the season to end. His mother (Amira Casar) is a transcriber, and his father (a gentle and wise Michael Stuhlbarg) is a professor of archaeology who invites a graduate student to their Italian villa annually for an internship.

This year, the year being sometime in the early 1980s, its rugged and strapping 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer) who makes the trip to Europe: tall, handsome, quietly brash, and every part the intellectual of his hosts, bursting on the scene like a cowboy at a saloon, and who, by the end of his six weeks with the Perlman family, would have completely shattered Elio’s self-perceptions.

At first, Elio is sceptical. He misreads Oliver’s self-assurance as arrogance, his laid-back demeanour as impoliteness (taking particular offense to his guest’s pithy use of the word “later” in place of a formal farewell). Elio playfully tests Oliver like a competitive sibling would another, before that scepticism gives way to curiosity, then fondness, then nervous admiration—“I don’t know why you’re always putting yourself down” Oliver queries of Elio one afternoon. “So you won’t, I guess” — and, finally, into romance, as honest and sensually realised a romance as any ever put to film.

Indeed, this is one of the most evocative romantic dramas I’ve seen; as erotic as it is heart felt, a coming-of-age odyssey which derives so much of its vast impact from its director’s resolve to build the central bond between the two leads fastidiously, naturalistically, patiently.

It is true that the relationship between Elio and Oliver transpires over a short six-week passage, but this is no whirlwind Hollywood romance. There are no meet-cutes or montages—Guadagnino, working from James Ivory’s prudent, finger-tip sensitive screenplay (which in turn is based upon Andre Acimen’ same named novel) insists on sketching every impression of this journey to its fullest. What the director champions is an organic approach, hanging on the small moments, the seemingly innocuous interactions between the two—lazing around the pool, cycling through the city— procuring sexual tension, and transfiguring friendliness into the deepest of affections, almost imperceptibly.

It’s that organic quality that allows Call Me by Your Name to amass such tremendous affect. It’s not languid, but contemplative, Guadagnino taking no small moment in Elio’s formative saga for granted. Every off-the-cuff graze of the skin means something, every diverted glance and moment of eye contact rich and revelatory, each gesture bearing its own narrative as Elio explores contours and crevasses of his own identity that he didn’t know until now even existed. It’s an exploration Elio embarks upon with a painfully timid but inexhaustible, child-like inquisitiveness; scenes in which our young protagonist places Oliver’s swimming trunks over his head, and uses a peach to tease his aroused body, offering some of cinema’s most striking and candid images of sexual curiosity.

Necessarily, Call Me by Your Name’s searing affect hinges in no small part on its performances. Guadagnino requires of his cast that each strip themselvesbare and showcase their souls, a mountainous task to which each member fearlessly answers the call.The cast prove great benefactors of their director’s naturalistic approach, permitted as they are to wring every ounce of humanity and honesty from their characters; to hang, like Guadagnino’s cameras, on each moment.

Firstly there’s Michael Stuhlbarg as Elio’s knowing, perceptive father, embodying a gentility that sweetly presides over the film as a whole. Stuhlbarg is a beacon of paternal warmth, a quality no better exemplified than it is in a late monologue which will no doubt be a point of praise long after the film’s tenure in cinemas. It’s a scene destined to take its place alongside Ben Johnson’s speech by the tank in The Last Picture Show and Spencer Tracy’s in the finale of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Stuhlbarg speaks with both great lovingness, and a sagacious understanding of nature, romance and time.

Armie Hammer is a model of charisma as Oliver, imposing in his intelligence and confidence, but slowly, surely chipping that impressive veneer down to a core of shaking sensitivity. Oliver may be the senior in the relationship, but there is a fragility to the character which Hammer carefully renders.

No one impresses more than Chalamet however, in a complex, endlessly layered performance that skilfully navigates the gawkish, helpless, immaturities of his age, whilst imbuing it all with an intellect, wit, and cool that far exceeds Elio’s years. It’s a precarious balancing act masterfully done, and one which yields the film’s greatest emotional rewards; Elio’s longing, his passion, his luminous personality at once beautiful, mesmerising, and tragic. If the touchstone of Stuhlbarg’s performance is that late monologue, then Chalamet’s is surely the film’s final moment which accompanies the end credits. It’s a moment that couldn’t be simpler, yet more raw. Few film’s save their biggest punch for such a time, but Guadagnino does here, and through Chalamet, it’s perhaps the most devastating scene from all of 2017.

Simple, yet raw—it’s a snapshot of the film as a whole, which through its grounded, patient construction provides a most thoughtful meditation on self-discovery and romance that is first utterly compelling, then painfully intimate, and finally wise. This is a universal entertainment, unflinching in its sexuality, but uniquely insightful in its treatment of the naivety of youth, the exploration of identity, and the stifling confusion which accompanies any emotion when experienced for the first time, least of all love. Few films have the reach of Luca Guadagnino’s latest, fewer still achieve such evocative power. Call Me by Your Name is a film which will hold our attention through awards season, and then, deservedly, for many years to follow.

Rating:

4/4