+ Best Romance of the Year + Sexiest Movie of the Year + Best Screen Couple of the Year: Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet + Best Shooting Star Actor of the Year: Timothée Chalamet + Best Italian Movie of the Year + Best Poster of the Year
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| The greatest poster for Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name is this little-used beauty, which recalls a scene from the film and also points to its theme of desire and lush sensuality - with the evocative image of a juicy peach |
In the summer of 1983, an American professor of archeology resides as before in a villa in Northern Italy, where an attractive assistant and student from America, Oliver is welcomed to stay in the house for some weeks, in which he sparks up a passionate romance with the professor and his wife's son, Elio.
Call Me by Your Name is written by James Ivory (The Guru (1969)), based on the same-titled 2007 novel by André Aciman (Eight White Nights (2010)), and directed as the 5th feature by great Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love/Io Sono l'Amore (2009)), designated the last part of his Desire trilogy (I Am Love and A Bigger Splash (2015) are the previous entries.)
Call Me by Your Name certainly is a film about desire, - actually capital D Desire. It is achingly sensual and erotic. Not that scenes runs amuck in explicit sex as Abdellatif Kechiche's recent, great lesbian love story Blue Is the Warmest Color/La Vie d'Adèle (2013) did. - Which is disappointing to some audiences, and relieving others. And yet, depending on one's tastes, Call Me by Your Name may be the most erotic film to come out in many years. Its sensuality is constant, and its sexually vibrant portrayal of consuming desire is pulsing and sparking off the screen. Call Me by Your Name is hot, hot, hot!
The relation depicted, - between Timothée Chalamet (Homeland (2012), TV-series), who was 21 at the time of filming, but plays a 17 year-old, and Armie Hammer (J. Edgar (2011)), who is (just) 9 years his senior in real life, - could have been taken to thematic places of something about the forbidden fruits, - but this is not the direction in Call Me by Your Name. This is mainly due to the unique, insightful nature of Elio's parents, played with inspiring dignity by Amira Casar (Me and Kaminski/Ich und Kaminski (2015)) and Michael Stuhlbarg (American Experience (2006-09) documentary TV-series). Chalamet and Hammer are impressively natural and delicious to look at in the main parts, playing the kind of cinema infatuation that seems so convincing that one can't help wonder, if it continued off-screen.
Call Me by Your Name is beautifully shot on 35 mm film by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Soi Cowboy (2008)) and benefits from two sensitive songs by Sufjan Stevens created for the film, Mystery of Love and Visions of Gideon.
The film has very little in the way of a conflict, much less anything resembling ugliness. It is guilty pleasure in its purest form: a mountain of exploration has to be conquered; this happens, and then there is the after, the hurt. The lush Italian summer scenery competes with the actors' sudden love, piano playing and intellectual, elitist discourses, SPOILER and the sole conflict of the film becomes that time invariably runs out for this precious summer's romance. At the aching conclusion, we remain with the mushy Elio, and woe to the audience member who doesn't him/herself remember the keen pain that follows an end to a lovely romance such as this.
In this way, Call Me by Your Name is a far opposite to the last major gay break-out film, Barry Jenkins' great Moonlight (2016), which followed a gay man's growing up in a situation that was not lacking in conflict.
Call Me by Your Name is a noble tribute to the strong experiences of love that some are lucky enough to enjoy at some point in life, one of those that bloom but are cut off, short and sweet - and fiercely painful. The romance's loveliness here is so intense and its course so calm and pleasant so as to almost be too much for some, as myself, who can't help but become jealous, in some way, towards the two. We share in their fictional connection, at least, while the movie is on.
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Cost: 3.5 mil. $
Box office: 25.4 mil. $ and counting
= Already a huge hit
[Call Me by Your Name premiered 22 January (Sundance Film Festival) and runs 132 minutes. The book rights were bought in 2007, and Ivory was involved first. His script included more explicit sex and nudity, voice-over narration and a section in Rome, all of which Guadagnino removed once he was hired to direct, citing "market realities". Shia LeBeouf was in talks for the Oliver part but was dropped due to his "various troubles." Hammer and Chalamet had no screen test but was chosen following a rehearsal in which they made out convincingly. Shooting took 32-24 days from May - June 2016 on location in the Lombardy region in Italy. Chalamet already knew how to play piano and speak French, but learned the guitar and his Italian lines specifically for the film. The film opened #14, its peak, in 4 theaters to a 412k $ first weekend in North America, the highest per-theater average of 2017. It widened to 815 theaters and has grossed 14.3 mil. $ there to date. It has still to open in several major markets: France (28 Feb.), Germany (1 Mar.), South Korea (22 Mar.) and Japan (27 April). The film is nominated for 4 Oscars: For Best Picture, Actor (Chalamet, - the youngest nominee since Mickey Rooney for Babes in Arms (1937)), Adapted Screenplay and Song (Mystery of Love). It was nominated for 2 Golden Globes, 4 BAFTAs, won an AFI Film of the Year award, is nominated for 6 Independent Spirit Awards, won two National Board of Review awards as well as many other honors. IMDb users have voted it into the site's Top 250; at #186, it sits between Wild Tales (2014) and Platoon (1986). Hammer returned in Final Portrait (2017), Chalamet in Hot Summer Nights (2017), and Guadagnino is returning with two slated 2018 titles; his much anticipated remake of Dario Argento's horror masterpiece Suspiria (1977), also titled Suspiria, and a thriller, Rio. He has also talked of a sequel to Call Me by Your Name and has laid out plans to continue Elio and Oliver's story in several films as François Truffaut did with his Antoine Doinel films. A dubious plan for this by Guadagnino is that Elio does not become a gay man but instead cultivates "an intense relationship" with Marzia (Esther Garrel (Thirst Street (2017))), his female fling in the film. Call Me by Your Name is certified fresh at 96 % with an 8.8 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Call Me by Your Name?
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