A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
Brilliant performances enrich intoxicating coming-of-age tale set in Northern Italy
It’s a rare movie that knows when to move and when to stay still. Call Me by Your Name, which takes place in “Summer, 1983, Somewhere in Northern Italy,” is just such a film, lazy as a late-afternoon dragonfly one moment, rash and rushed as young love the next.
The young lovers in question are Oliver, an American student spending his summer as an assistant to his professor (Michael Stuhlbarg); and Elio, the professor’s son.
Both are revelatory. Oliver is played by Armie Hammer, who turned in such good work in The Social Network, seven years ago, but has been missing in plain sight since then, in tossed-away parts in J. Edgar and The Lone Ranger. He’s now found a performance to match his passion.
But it takes two, which brings us to Timothée Chalamet as Elio. He’s already made an impression on the screen this year in Lady Bird as Kyle, who briefly woos Saoirse Ronan.
Here he’s the opposite — virginal, book-learned, a little out of place as an American Jew in Italy. Quietly watchful, he’s equally intrigued and put off by Oliver’s confident, brusque manners. But soon he realizes he’s attracted to the good-looking student, and to girls too. It all makes for a confusing summer.
Italian director Luca Guadagnino is working from a 2007 novel by André Aciman, and adapted by James Ivory, of Merchant-Ivory fame. But what he brings to the project transcends words. The film is awash in sensual sounds, from the buzzing insects and birdsong of its rural setting, to an unforgettable scene involving a moist peach.
Then there are layers of musicality — Italian pop songs from the era, a few new numbers from Sufjans Stevens, and classical compositions, interpreted and reinterpreted. In one of their first bits of almost-open flirting, Elio tells Oliver the song he’s playing on the piano is a Bach cantata, the way Busoni would have played it if he’d altered Liszt’s version. (Now that is some cultured flirting.)
Not that spoken language doesn’t play a part. The characters converse in Italian, English, French and even a little German, sometimes in deference to the nationality of the listener, but just as often as a way of indicating allegiance; when Elio starts to distance himself from his girlfriend Marzia (Esther Garrel), he stops speaking perfect French and switches to American English. She senses the change from the first syllable.
Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar are nicely underplayed as Elio’s parents. They know what he’s going through, but smart enough to realize there’s not much they can do to help. “Just remember I’m here,” says his father. “Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once, and before you know it your heart’s worn out. Right now there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it, and with it the joy you felt.”
It’s a lovely sentiment, but
I’d like to leave the last word to Oliver, who’s been reading Heraclitus.
The ancient Greek philosopher was the one who came up with the notion that one never steps in the same river twice. Oliver, in a brief and solitary voice-over, remarks: “The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing, so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing.”
That’s as apt a synonym for “coming of age” as you’re likely to find.