Call Me By Your Name: We want to live there.
Things we love about Luca Guadagnino’s film Call Me By Your Name, in no particular order.
1. First love should be this beautiful. Even the pain is beautiful.
2. The villa in northern Italy, and all of northern Italy, matches that beauty.
3. Timothee Chalamet’s Elio. He feels everything, and we know exactly what he’s feeling. (The final scene is just his face, and it’s enough.)
4. Armie Hammer’s Oliver. We don’t know exactly what he’s feeling, but he’s as beautiful as the sculptures by Praxiteles.
5. Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar as Elio’s parents, the Perlmans. So civilized, so erudite, intelligent and above all, kind. We may love Elio’s parents more than we love Elio and Oliver.
6. The soundtrack which includes Sufjan Stevens, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Psychedelic Furs, and introduced us to the work of John Adams.
7. A movie where people discuss the etymology of apricot. Where a teenager plays Bach as Liszt would’ve played him. Where people speak four languages at home and translate old German tales.
8. Esther Garrel’s Marzia, who understands why Elio disappeared on her, in part because he gave her a book of poetry by Antonia Pozzi. This movie also introduced us to Antonia Pozzi.
Thought
To have two long wings
of shadow
and fold them up against your pain;
to be shadow, the peace
of evening
around your faded
smile.
9. That speech by Elio’s father Prof. Perlman, which all parents should be required to learn. Here is the text from the novel by Andre Aciman.
In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!
10. We wish Mafalda was our housekeeper.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
February 6th, 2018 at 14:57
I agree, 9.5 out of ten, especially on numbers 3 and 4. Timothee’s Elio is so raw and natural, and one of the best performances by a young actor in the last ten years.
My only point of contention is whether the pain was beautiful. I thought Elio was so young to be burdened with such profound and genuine loss. How do you recover from that, especially at 17?
And may I add, as item 11, the way their items of clothing (Oliver’s shirt and Elio’s sunglasses) became essential in projecting their characters. I will never wear my Wayfarers ever again without thinking back to Elio and this film.
I clapped at the end of the movie, though what I really wanted to do was cry with Elio.
February 10th, 2018 at 10:44
Mafalda!