Gorgeous view of first love

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This article was published 26/01/2018 (3043 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first and most obvious thing to say about this coming-of-age love story, directed by Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love and A Bigger Splash) and based on the novel by André Aciman, is that it’s achingly beautiful. Trees, summer houses, young people swimming, plates of peaches, the curve of a lover’s arm, nature, art — they all approach artsy-perfume-ad levels of sensuous gorgeousness.

The second and even more important thing to note is that all this visual lushness would go nowhere if the film weren’t also emotionally lush. A marvel of mood, atmosphere and dramatic nuance, Call Me by Your Name tracks, first with infinite delicacy and then with sudden intense force, the course of first love.

Seventeen-year-old Elio (Lady Bird’s Timothée Chalamet), summering with his cosmopolitan family in northern Italy in the early 1980s, begins a tentative relationship with American grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer from The Social Network), who has come to assist Elio’s archeologist father (Michael Stuhlbarg).

We watch Elio move through this cultured, multilingual bourgeois milieu in his careless preppie sportswear, swimming, reading, tanning, lounging around on his bed. He is an unstable, unmodulated adolescent mix of brash confidence and crippling insecurity.

On the outside, Oliver seems to exude all-American directness and certitude, but we realize, following Elio’s watchful gaze, that his inner life is more complex.

Nothing happens and everything happens, the story’s growing emotional power coming from subtle, complicated lead performances, exquisite pacing and dreamy, melancholy music from Sufjan Stevens.

Since its première at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film has drawn viewer adoration and critical acclaim, along with some backlash. Perhaps because it is scripted by James Ivory — of the 1980s and ‘90s filmmaking team Merchant Ivory, known for their gauzy, prestigious literary adaptations — Call Me by Your Name has been criticized for being too polite, too pretty, too apolitical, too bourgeois.

Well, it is bourgeois: It’s hard to watch the film without being pierced — at least momentarily — by the conviction that your life will not be complete unless you own a 17th-century villa in northern Italy. Still, the other digs seem to miss the film’s point. The story’s relative discretion about gay sex is characteristic of Guadagnino, a director who tends to find more eroticism in the long lead-up of desire — in small gestures, hidden glances, unspoken tensions and one pretty remarkable scene involving a peach — than its graphic culmination.

And while AIDS is never explicitly mentioned, anyone with a knowledge of the 1980s can feel the shadow of the epidemic darkening Elio’s sunlit garden.

Encapsulated by a deeply sad monologue by Elio’s father, Call Me by Your Name is an elegiac examination of an ephemeral feeling, one that is connected to both a particular era and a particular stage of life. The story is about the heedless beauty and reckless pain of youth, but even as we experience these things cinematically, we’re already mourning their inevitable loss.

At one point, Elio is asked how he spends his summer. Bored, languid, restless, he sardonically replies that he spends it “waiting for summer to end.”

Anyone over 17 knows it ends very quickly.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca