A teen, and film, devoted to love

Set in the summer of 1983, in a land of leisurely alfresco lunches and spontaneous all-day bike rides under the northern Italian sun, the romantic idyll “Call Me by Your Name” is enough to make you move to the town of Crema, even if your rational self realizes the director Luca Guadagnino trades in a heightened, miragelike state of mythic yearning.

For the record, Crema’s patron saint is Pantaleon — the patron saint of physicians. The love doctor’s always on call in this corner of the world, and there’s no cure for what ails the young lovers except time, experience, regret and gratitude.

In other words: “Call Me by Your Name” is about being 17. Timothee Chalamet, currently on screens as the blithely self-absorbed charmer advocating for “un-special sex” in “Lady Bird,” stars as Elio Perlman, the son of an American antiquities and archaeology professor (Michael Stuhlbarg). Each summer, for six weeks, professor Perlman and his wife, Annella (Amira Casar), host a visiting graduate student to help with research. By popular consensus, this year’s recruit, Oliver, played by Armie Hammer, rates as a standout, suggesting a Greek statue in shorts as well as a sexually ambiguous object of desire.

Elio’s embarking on a tentative affair with a local girl (Esther Garrel), but Oliver presents a problem he cannot solve. At first, the visitor’s casual arrogance (“Later,” his chosen exit line, gets under Elio’s skin) prevents Elio from warming up to him even as a friend. But clearly the teenager is smitten. Oliver’s feelings remain opaque: Is the grad student toying with the professor’s son? Is he straight? Bi? Gay? What’s his story?

We learn a few things, but Oliver by design remains an attractive abstraction — the role usually taken by a comely, undercharacterized female in traditional hetero screen romances. The days and weeks pass. The young men, seven years apart, grow closer and then become intimate. “Call Me by Your Name” unfolds along country roads, lazy rivers, moonlit trysts and, finally, as the summer nears the end, something more. With a soundtrack as fantastic as this movie’s, director Guadagnino could have filmed his adaptation with a signpost and a filing cabinet in the leading roles and it still would have worked.

The script, as written by James Ivory and revised by Guadagnino, strips the novel of its voice-over and its characters’ later years, living in the present tense. Guadagnino sees Elio as a work in fluid progress. Chalamet is excellent, saving his purest acting for the killer final shot several minutes in length, when we finally see what these weeks with Oliver have meant to him.

Stuhlbarg’s professor remains in the background for most of the picture. Then he delivers a lengthy monologue that sets up that final shot brilliantly. Stuhlbarg’s performance is a thing of beauty.

Hammer is doing some of the most easy-breathing and relaxed best work of his career as Oliver, though if there’s an element of Guadagnino’s film that’s not quite right, it’s Hammer’s innate selfregard, a little more than the role requires.

When he’s not transcribing Schoenberg, Elio sorts through the beauty all around him and what he’s meant to do with it. If the movie didn’t end with that extended close-up of Chalamet, sitting before a fireplace and showing us the feelings he’s still afraid to show his parents, we wouldn’t feel nearly as much for either Elio or his story. “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should,” the professor says at one reflective point, “that we go bankrupt by the age of 30.” This is a very, very good film devoted to love, and to forestalling the cure permanently.