'Call Me By Your Name' Review

Call Me By Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino and adapted for the screen by James Ivory, is an achingly beautiful film. Laced with sensuality and lust, of unguarded beauty and need, it’s a story of music prodigy Elio's (Timothee Chalamet) romantic awakening when an American student, Oliver (Armie Hammer), comes to stay at the family home for the summer in sumptuous Northern Italy. It evokes such a magnetic and intense rendition of love that it can often feel overwhelming. It’s a tale of uncertainty and longing.

It is anchored by the stunning and powerful performances by Chalameet and Hammer, offering up all the different sides of sweet, new summer love—tenderness, playfulness, the back and forth of interest and suspicion. It’s a brilliantly natural and exposed whirlwind of emotion. The duality of the two is engrossing. Elio wants it all and wants it now, eagerness shading the quiet reality of what it would mean if they gave into what they’re feeling. And Oliver’s more mature, aware, and knowing sensibilities know something such as this can be only fleeting.

Chalamet is a revelation. His body, his movements and expressions exude an electrical and vulnerable physicality, detailing a subtle, interesting perspective on masculinity, wanting to be wanted and cared and held but also the side of a young lover, of exploration and excitement, which especially comes about in scenes with Marzia, a young women he starts a sexual relationship with. Hammer is an adonis of confidence, charisma, and unexpected warmth. The two don’t begin with immediate attraction, initially having little in common. Elio’s introverted tendencies are smothered by Oliver’s overt expressiveness. He gets all the looks, all the attention, and all the friends almost immediately. But through this you can see the threads of Elio’s want and to an extent possessiveness to be with Oliver.

There are so many exquisite layers to this film, from the wonderful and vibrant photography and the asides of archeology and history that alludes to the nature of memory and the glow of what the past can mean, to a simplistic and moving score that’s dotted with some fantastic 80s tunes. And look, there’s quite a bit of cycling around Italy but dammit if it’s not the most picturesque cycling to watch. The film moves along as if in a dream, a fantasy. It rolls and shifts in a relaxed manner threaded with a resolute yet delicate emotional veracity.

The work of Michael Stuhlbarg as Elio’s father offers up some wonderful and poignant moments, including one of the most tender and moving scenes between and a father and son in recent memory. The rest of the cast is impeccable and all emotionally rounded. This is a film where everything feels heightened, yet Guadagnino never loses focuses of the dramatic and relevant core that the film is latched to.

At times, the film tips into a sense of indulgence that can be alienating, the setting, and carefree nature of its young characters divorced from reality. But that ultimately heightens the emotional context of the movie, and rams it home in a final 20 minutes that is a blistering assault on our emotional fortitude, such is the overwhelming, yet concentrated power of that denouement. While yes, them entering into a same sex romance and the implications of that does darken the margins of what they have, it’s never played for cheap manipulation or lazy plotting. It is essentially a non-issue and the movie is all the better for it.

Often times romance and coming of age tales can feel illusive and artificial, stories that can only exist on the screen or in our fervent imaginations. Call Me By Your Name shatters such assumptions. It is an arresting film of the highest quality that is at first a sun dappled love affair that so many of us fantasize about, which then beautifully morphs into the fleeting nature of that very same love, and the aftershocks of those feelings that can ultimately fulfill and bring joy to a tender, restless soul.