An incomparably lovely romance
Call Me By Your Name 15 cert, 132 min ★★★★★ Dir Luca Guadagnino Starring Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel
Elio, Oliver, Oliver, Elio. These two young men are so in tune, even their names laid side by side turn into music. Oliver (Armie Hammer) is a mid-20s academic on an Italian field trip. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is the 17-year-old son of Oliver’s mentor and host. When Oliver finds him, he’s poised on the cusp of adulthood like a first-time diver on the board.
The story of their summer together is the subject of the exquisite new film from Luca Guadagnino – the director of I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. It’s an incomparably lovely period romance, as warm and therapeutic as the sunlight that suffuses every frame. The period is the early Eighties – unmissably so, thanks to the shorts, the trainers, and the pop music. But the setting, described as “somewhere in northern Italy”, is hazy enough to set it a step back from the real world.
The screenwriter, working from a novel by André Aciman, is none other than James Ivory, and the film rings with all the elegance of the 89-year-old Merchant Ivory co-founder’s very finest work. It’s also Guadagnino’s best to date – teasing, ravishing and with an openheartedness that makes you ache.
Bright torrents of piano set the scene – John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction, the first of many ideal soundtrack choices that also include two new songs by Sufjan Stevens, the US singersongwriter – before Oliver arrives at the Perlman family’s villa in a blaze of boisterous glamour. He’s there to help Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor, archive documents about Greco-roman sculpture. But when his 6ft 5in frame first saunters in, it’s like one of the statues has swung by in person. He’s a Jewish-american graduate student – a proud one, with a Star of David on his neck chain. Elio, who’s Jewish too, but less confidently so, is struck by his easy charm.
At breakfast on the terrace, Oliver devours an oozingly soft-boiled egg, and the sheer pleasure he takes in it leaves Elio mesmerised. Guadagnino’s films have always been alive to food’s sensual possibilities, and this brief but unforgettable example, with its gush of yolk and Hammer’s half-embarrassed, half-delighted laughter, is an instant classic of its type. And if you think that sounds indecent, wait until you see what they do later with a peach.
At first, their relationship is brotherly more than anything else, and their chemistry feels unaffected and spontaneous. Things slowly turn romantic, which becomes confusing for both of them, but Elio is no more perplexed by his feelings for Oliver than by those he harbours for his on-off childhood sweetheart Marzia (Esther Garrel). There’s a tremendous scene in which Elio and his friends watch the slightly older, significantly more confident Oliver dirty-dancing with a woman at a party. The girls want to be with him, the boys want to be him. With Elio, it’s a bit of both.
Crucially, there’s no grand romantic obstacle course nor a villain vying to keep them apart. All that holds them back are pragmatism and caution, plus a shared understanding that times this special are fragile and easily broken.
I’ve always enjoyed Hammer’s more mannered mainstream roles, such as in Mirror Mirror, which tend to spoof his chiselled looks. But his work here is better than anything he’s done since The Social Network – it’s witty, compassionate, swaggeringly physical, and never less than fully inhabited. Chalamet also makes an indelible impression, not least because this 21-year-old newcomer seems so untutored. And Stuhlbarg, a treasure throughout, gets a fatherly monologue so tenderly performed you can barely catch your breath. It’s one beautiful moment in a film filled with them – gone in a heartbeat, but leaving ripples that reach across a lifetime. RC