Very seldom does a movie based on a book live up to its source material, but ‘Call me By Your Name’ is an instant cinematic masterpiece. Maybe it’s because enough time has passed since I first read the book by Andre Aciman that this feels equally fresh and wondrous, or maybe its treatment at the hands of director Luca Guadagnino, and leads Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer, makes it its own work of art – whatever the case, ‘Call Me By Your Name’ is brilliant, and moved me more than any other movie has in recent and long-past history.
An idyllic summer in some vague Northern Italian town finds an American, Oliver (Hammer) visiting for several weeks. The son of the family with whom he is staying, Elio (Chalamet), is at first put off by the arrogance and ease with which Oliver quickly assimilates, but soon a friendship blossoms. It leads to other, trickier things, but it takes a while to get there. At first some people may find that it drags, but Guadagnino is merely setting up for a richly rewarding final third.
Set in the 1980’s, that decade is slightly removed from the timeless story, but does manage to creep in with a few pop songs, those iconic striped short-shorts, and the cumbersome walkmans. (Not to mention the widely-celebrated dancing scene in which Mr. Hammer comes into his endearing own.) The sun-soaked summer, with all its lazy pleasures, opportunities for fresh fruit, and revitalizing splashes in pools and ponds, forms the gorgeous backdrop to the proceedings.
As Oliver, Hammer brilliantly capitalizes on the arrogant, familiar, and all-too-cocky American role, but at moments he lets the golden-boy mask drop, and the devastation in his eyes, and the slightly wrinkled brow when he studies Elio as he sleeps, are gut-wrenching. For his part, Chalamet offers a revelatory, career-shaping performance. His Elio is all teenage awkwardness, preternatural wisdom, and hopeless, diehard romanticism even when he doesn’t know it.
While the movie is a glorious work of art on its own, on a personal level it moved me just a little bit more. Never in my life has a movie touched upon so many memories, so many key moments in the youth that formed me, yet the ache and longing of and adolescent’s coming-of-age-and-angst is a universal touchstone. By the end of the film we are left asking the eternally-terrifying question: what do we really mean to each other? In certain summers, when all is tender and raw and beautiful, the answer is… everything.
When the movie was over, Suzie and I went our separate ways – her car was in the downstairs lot and mine was on the upper level of the mall. It was around midnight. Snow was falling – impossibly-large and fluffy flakes, noiselessly drifting through the dark night. I sat in the car and wept for what I had just seen.
All those times I thought I was in love with someone, when the idea of them filled and informed every single thing I did, came rushing back. Four decades of loving and wishing and hoping and crying, hurting and lamenting and laughing and smiling – all the moments I gave in to the pain and the joy and the despondency – I cried for the ways we choose to embrace the miraculous ecstasy and exquisite sorrow, and for all of us who took the tougher path because we knew somehow it would be better. I never shied away from the pain because I knew there would be no escaping it; the only way out was through. And there were times and days, from the moment I woke to the moment I fell asleep, that someone else occupied my existence, robbed me of who I was, and chipped away at my soul, but somehow I trusted it would be better that way.
In the end, I cried out of gratitude and gladness, because love is never wrong, and I would never regret giving it. No matter how it ended, no matter what would become of me, I knew what it was to love, and I wouldn’t erase the heartache or the hurt for all the blissful ignorance in the world.
“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty 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!” ~ Andre Aciman
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