2/10/2018 0 Comments Call Me By Your NameMore news for Call Me By Your Name. Elio and Oliver’s affair begins slowly with each circling the other at a distance, conveying the kind of nonchalance that’s a shield for interest. Oliver proves far better at this part of the game; he knows more than to look too long and too hard. Elio’s furtive, ducking glances, by contrast, tend to linger, hovering in the air like questions. He’s increasingly curious about this new guest, but soon inexplicably (to Elio, at least) irked by him as well, leading Elio to complain to his parents about Oliver’s standard signoff (“later”). But when Elio scribbles a private rebuke in a notebook, chastising himself for responding harshly toward Oliver, it’s as if he were writing an apologetic love letter. Guadagnino is very good at catching the indolent drift of long summer days, with their sleepiness and bared limbs. ![]() ![]() Everyone seems to move in slow motion at the villa, except perhaps the family’s hard-working maid. This languor fits the tempo of Elio and Oliver’s relationship, which evolves over meals, drowsy idylls, a little work and a spontaneous piano recital that becomes an overture to seduction. ![]() ![]() A gifted musician, Elio easily moves from piano to guitar (much as his family shifts from speaking Italian to French to English), talent that makes him seem at one with the villa’s miles of bookshelves, its velvet sofas, scattered Oriental rugs and tastefully arranged antiques. A spontaneous piano recital: Mr. Hammer, left, and Mr. Credit Sony Pictures Classics It’s an alluring milieu — charming, civilized and perfectly, if a shade too flawlessly, arranged. Here, even a busy breakfast table and the fruit on a tree can seem art directed. Guadagnino almost can’t help making everything look intoxicating, yet he also makes you believe in this family’s reality. The grand piano isn’t for show and neither are the books or the open affection and respect with which Elio and his parents treat one another. (The movie reminds you how rarely characters read for pleasure, much less listen to classical music.) “Call Me by Your Name” is set in 1983, so no one is staring into a smartphone. And the time frame means that AIDS doesn’t figure in the story, though there’s a suggestion that the closet does. Advertisement The story primarily unfolds through Elio’s point of view. The restless camera tags alongside him, showing you what he sees, his erotic reveries and yearning. And it’s Elio who initiates the affair, at least overtly, though Oliver later admits to playing his part in what the story frames as a mutual seduction. Guadagnino avoids directly engaging the difference in Elio and Oliver’s ages, which might have forced him to explore the underside of his sumptuous surfaces to greater, messier effect. Guadagnino leans on beauty, as when Elio’s father poetically speaks to an increasingly agitated Oliver about the “ageless ambiguity” of some male statues (“as if they’re daring you to desire them”). Written by James Ivory (the director of films like ), “Call Me by Your Name” progresses through evasions and encounters, with Elio advancing, Oliver receding and their circling narrowing. The two don’t (can’t, won’t) always say what they mean. Guadagnino speaks for them by eroticizing their world, making desire visible in the luxuriousness of the setting, in the green enveloping the villa, the gushing waters of a pool and the graceful lines of male statues. When Oliver hungrily eats a soft-boiled egg, cracking the shell and causing the yolk to messily spurt, Mr. Guadagnino’s lyricism slides into comedy; it’s hard to know just how self-mocking the moment is meant to be. Even so, the lyricism seduces as does fragile, ecstatic Elio. “Call Me by Your Name” is less a coming-of-age story, a tale of innocence and loss, than one about coming into sensibility. In that way, it is about the creation of a new man who, the story suggests, is liberated by pleasure that doesn’t necessarily establish sexual identity. It’s important that Elio and Oliver have relationships with women, though for seemingly different reasons: the overheated Elio sleeps with a girlfriend (Esther Garrel), while Oliver carries on a more performative affair with a local (Victoire Du Bois). The women are not treated with much kindness, but these affairs further complicate the movie’s vision of pleasure’s fluidity. There are moments when Mr. Guadagnino’s visual choices seem unintentionally in competition with the quieter, intricate emotions that his actors put across so movingly. He can be discreet to the point of coyness (bodies sweat but don’t necessarily grunt), but it is finally the insistent delicacy and depth of emotion that makes these characters so heart-skippingly tender. The charismatic Mr. Chalamet, Mr. Hammer and Mr. ![]() Stuhlbarg — whose brilliant delivery of a tricky speech pierces the heart and, crucially, the movie’s lustrous patina — transform beauty into feeling. In one alive, vulnerable and life-altering summer, Elio’s desire finds its purpose. He loves, and in loving, he becomes. And then the day dawns, the light of morning bringing clarity, maybe. Sunshine beams across the lush lawn as Oliver joins Elio and his parents for breakfast, untutored in the ways of soft-boiled eggs and village geography. Elio peers across the table. The camera mimics his eyes, landing on a small, silver Star of David dangling from Oliver’s neck, shown in sudden close-up and framed by the V of his unbuttoned collar. A pang of desire ripples across the screen, announcing Elio’s quiet enchantment. In some regards, it’s unfair to compare these three films when so many of their specifics are different. “Carol” revolves around two white women in cloistered 1950s New York, “Moonlight” chronicles a black boy hardening into adulthood in contemporary inner-city Miami, and “Call Me by Your Name” concerns erudite globetrotters in 1983, when Reagan conservatism was sweeping America. But together they are paragons exemplifying the framework that now bolsters gay romance on the big screen. None of the central characters die; no one is abjectly punished for their desires. Each movie ends with a twinkle of bittersweet hope ― something that can’t be said for most queer stories throughout history, even excellent ones like “Brokeback Mountain,” “Philadelphia,” “A Single Man,” “Heavenly Creatures” and “My Own Private Idaho.”. Elio and Oliver’s affair peaks only when the end of the summer nears. Oliver, the pupil of Elio’s academic father (Michael Stuhlbarg), who facilitates an annual internship at the family’s villa in northern Italy, has been careful not to overextend his welcome. “If you only knew how little I know about the things that matter,” Elio tells Oliver, finally hinting that the thing he knows least is how to express his attraction. That crucial sentence recalls Carol’s sentiment toward Therese: “What a strange girl you are, flung out of space.” And it invokes a teenage Chiron, speaking to Kevin in the gleam of twilight: “I wanna do a lot of things that don’t make sense.”. Instead, devotion crescendoes in tiny increments. A performatively defensive Elio tells his parents it’s impolite that Oliver’s preferred adieu is an offhand “later!” At a nightclub, his eyes stay glued on Oliver dancing with a woman. He scribbles notes that say things like “can’t stand the silence.” He pops up from a lake wearing Oliver’s Star of David around his neck. On average, these signifiers would be grander in a tale of heterosexual love, where best friends can agonize over will-they, won’t-they predicaments, and sages can help to galvanize a budding pursuit. Because the wait was tortuous, there are few swoons as powerful as that of Elio and Oliver’s first kiss, planted after Elio decides he can’t settle for underhanded flirtations any longer. And there’s no finale like the finale of “Carol,” in which Carol smiles softly as Therese glides toward her, confirming that, yes, they’ll give the relationship a shot after all, despite so many cultural roadblocks. Borrowing the subtle language of queer yearning, these personifications of self-acceptance spark some of the most moving moments in modern cinema. Even as more same-sex pairings touch each other onscreen, gay visibility is still a battlefield. It’s telling that only one queer movie per year breaks through the indie noise. In 2017 alone, the collective attention paid to “Beach Rats,” “Battle of the Sexes,” “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” “God’s Own Country,” “Princess Cyd” and “Thelma” trails that of “Call Me by Your Name,” which was anointed the chosen one after its rosy in January. Even so, these films ― including the AIDS-themed “BPM” ― sculpt characters who refuse to be victims. To wit, “Call Me by Your Name” is about the beauty of exploration. “We wasted so many days,” Elio tells Oliver after their mutual endearment has fully blossomed. The closet robbed them of their already limited time together. As Sufjan Stevens sings in “,” a ballad featured in the movie, “How much sorrow can I take? / Blackbird on my shoulder / And what difference does it make / When this love is over?” The summer must end, and heartbreak will follow. But that intoxicating enchantment is forever. In many ways, the story is just beginning. Everything’s an aching close-up.
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