Call Me By Your Name
This is a sensual, sun-baked slice of summer romance.
Call Me By Your Name, set somewhere vague in Northern Italy, follows the beautiful but tangled relationship between Elio (Timothée Chalamet), a graduate staying with his parents, and visiting American professor Oliver (Armie Hammer).
It might seem like a plain sailing, simple kind of narrative but this story is complex. Deceptively smooth and gorgeous to look at, you slip into this movie as easy as you would a jacuzzi, but it quickly becomes clear that you are being seduced, much in the same way as Oliver beguiles Elio. Before long, this warm painting begins to unfold layers of conflicted desire, social etiquette and self-doubt like a sexy but dangerous origami flower.
Chalamet is spell-binding in this coming-of-age story. Delivering an astonishingly layered performance, he captures the transition from agonising first crush to suffocating first love spectacularly. Hammer is predictably graceful, fluid and chisel-jawed: basically a tanned gazelle of a man, but he also brings something darker to the role and is at times as frightening and impassive as he is seductive.
The original tracks by Sufjan Stevens bookend the movie beautifully, weaving in threads of angst and heartbreak, making you feel as if you are receiving a silken, melancholic hug. Meanwhile, the script, adapted from André Aciman’s novel, sports dialogue that is offensively beautiful and intricate, lingering on the seeming smallest of details and turning them into objects of profound importance.
This is a leisurely film that languishes in subtleties and wallows in suspenseful slow-burn drama. For the most part, it captures beautifully the sultry sluggishness of the summer holidays and frames it with a timeless quality that traps you inside itself like an insect in amber. However, there are also the odd unnecessary scenes that makes snails look speedy, paint drying seem swift and molasses look like The Flash.
In many ways this film might confirm common preconceptions of ‘art house’ films, i.e. drawn-out, sparse dialogue, deliberately unusual or containing provocative subject matter, but at the same time each film needs its own tempo and breathing space and telling an art house movie to be a blockbuster would be like asking a marathon runner to win the 100 metres. Unlike other movies that barely let you catch up with them, this film invites you to pull up a chair, enjoy a meal of risotto alla Milanese with a glass of Valtellina and even leans over to light your cigarette for you.
And this breathing space is really necessary, as the fact that the love story is between a 17 year old and a 24 year old posits an abuse of power and will challenge you and at times make you uncomfortable (one particular scene will change the way you view peaches forever). Yet, it does that rare thing that so few films dare to do: it allows you to entirely inhabit the lives of its characters and breathe their every love, loss and regret.
8/10
