Call Me by Your Name
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, drama, rated R, in English, French, and Italian with subtitles, Regal Stadium 14, 3.5 chiles
Nothing happens very fast in this sun-drenched, languorous love story that unfolds like the pages of a book riffling gently in a soft summer breeze. The book is André Aciman’s much-acclaimed novel of sexual awakening, Call Me by Your Name, and the breeze wafts through a beautiful forested section of northern Italy, where seventeenyear-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) whiles away his summers in the early ’80s in the vacation villa of his parents, Prof. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), an American classics scholar, and his elegant Italian linguist wife (Amira Casar).
There’s nothing to do and there’s plenty to do for this teenager, who reads voraciously, plays piano (and adapts Bach for the guitar), dallies with the girls — locals and summer imports like himself, goes swimming, and waits for something important to happen in his life.
A stranger arrives. He’s Oliver (Armie Hammer), a tall, blond Adonis of an American graduate student, come to complete a summer internship with the professor. Elio’s father asks his son to clear out of his regular bedroom to accommodate the guest, which he does without complaint, thus creating an early echo of the coming mingling of souls that will be made explicit in the title phrase, when Oliver proposes to his young lover that they call each other by their own names.
But there’s no rushing into anything. They bike, they walk, they talk, they swim, they go to dances, they engage with the family in the heady intellectual exchanges that make up the common air of the household. They circle each other warily, curiously, often wearing no more than bathing trunks or shorts and T-shirts. And when they finally come together, more than an hour into the picture, it is the teenager who makes the decisive move. The filming is discreet, but the combustion is intense.
The performances are perfectly equal to the material. Hammer is, and looks, a little old for Oliver, who is twenty-four. It’s a discrepancy that takes some getting used to, but his breezy American confidence, overlaying something more interesting, makes a riveting character. The gangly twenty-two-year-old Chalamet (Lady Bird) is fully credible and appealing as the precocious adolescent whose intellect and accomplishments are at odds with his still emerging sense of his physical and emotional self. And the remarkable Stuhlbarg (The Shape of Water, The Post), who is this year’s actor-in-everything, has a scene near the film’s closing curtain that sums up a lot and will tear at your heart.
The adaptation of the novel is by the eighty-nine-year-old James Ivory, thrice Oscar-nominated but still winless, and it has all the lyrical beauty we’ve come to expect from the director of such classics as A Room With
a View and Howard’s End (and Maurice, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s gay-themed novel). The sensual direction by Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love) drenches this story in remembered passion. And there is a scene with a peach that may change forever the way you look at that fruit. — Jonathan Richards