‘Call Me By Your Name’ shows teen desire in seaside town
Young composer is already at height of powers despite his age
“Call Me by Your Name” is an emphatic celebration of the mystery and power of sexuality, and all its attendant danger, exaltation and tenderness. Here in a small Italian town, close to the sea — where Hellenic statues have a way of washing up onshore — the sun, the water and the surrounding beauty reinforce lust and longing; and everything is suffused with a charged, pagan innocence. It’s the least Puritan of movies, pre-Christian in its sensibility, and will perhaps seem jarring, arriving at this curious time in our cultural life. Based on the novel of the same name by Andre Aciman, “Call Me by Your Name” is the story of a 17-year-old boy named Elio, who becomes attracted to a graduate student, a visiting American scholar staying at the villa owned by the boy’s parents. Luca Guadagnino directs the film with a sense of languor, as though the heat or the beauty of the surroundings were persuading him to slow down and take it all in. He propels the action, not through quick cutting, but through Timothée Chalamet’s remarkably
sure-footed performance in the central role. Elio is a gifted young composer and musician, and the movie suggests that his ability to be crazy in love and in pursuit of this somewhat older guy is an offshoot of his talent, of the frequency of his vibration toward life itself.
It’s a performance of unexpected authority, the spectacle of someone ready to pounce on these new sensations and experiences. He prowls the villa, almost jumping out of his own skin with an awareness that this is his prime moment in life. We sense that, despite his being little more than a kid, he may never be this powerful, whether creatively, emotionally or sexually. And we sense that he knows it, too, and that he is, in this way, superior to every adult he encounters.
This authority of drive makes him very much the equal of the older man, Oliver (Armie Hammer). Elio may have the vulnerability of being young and defenseless against his own desire, but Oliver has the vulnerability of knowing he has already moved out of that golden aura of Eros that Elio inhabits. And so they approach each other, warily, neither admitting what’s going on, while beneath the surface, everything is happening.
“Call Me by Your Name” is transcendent in its first hour, communicating much through the camera’s evocation of nature and the screenplay’s clear yet subtle dialogue. Likewise, Hammer’s performance is a brilliant exercise in subtlety, suggesting a genial yet inappropriate spacetaking, the carelessness of the beautiful. He lets you feel Oliver’s awareness of Elio even as he’s playing his concealment of it. Oliver is so deft and so unapologetic in his signaling that, only when it’s acknowledged later, we think, yes, of course, that’s exactly what we saw.
The movie reaches a climax of sorts in its scene of the two men circling a World War I memorial, one of the many such monuments commemorating the young men from a particular town who were killed. That is civilization — the death and mutilation of young men — while “Call Me by Your Name” is about something outside of that, something elemental. Even once all the cards are on the table, the movie maintains most of its velocity, exploring Elio’s pansexual impulses toward the girls his own age.
Where the movie falters is in the portrayal of Elio’s bathetic and tiresome parents — played by Amira Casar and Michael Stuhlbarg — who cosset him and flatter him in a way that feels not only untrue to life but a means of stifling the movie’s anarchy. Stuhlbarg is a particular offender, in that he approaches every scene as if playing one action, which is to beg for love, both from the other characters and the audience.
This problem doesn’t go away but blossoms to destructive effect in one of the most cloying screen moments since Anne Hathaway sobbed through “I Dreamed a Dream” in “Les Miserables.” With a tear and a smile, the father reveals his own youthful longings. But no, the intimate history of some cuddly, neutered, pajama-bear dad simply has no business in the world this movie evokes.
The effect of Dad’s speech is to take the outlaw, the unapologetically dangerous and glorious and make it palatable — as if we wouldn’t find it palatable without the sanction of the father and, in a larger sense, the patriarchy. It’s to take something huge and vital between two specific people and domesticate it as one more thing in a cycle of endless and common recurrence.
The life, the true life and vitality of “Call Me by Your Name,” is a lust-ridden boy putting a man’s underwear over his head and breathing it in. It’s a 17-year-old kid, crazed by hormones, masturbating into a peach. It’s shocking and honest transgression, and to bring in some wistful old dad giving his blessing brings us back to middle-class, happy-liberal safety. It to take a beautiful Greek statue and sink it right back into the sea.
And yet ... “Call Me by Your Name” is so brave for so long that despite this glaring flaw, it must be counted among the year’s important movies. Venus de Milo has her arms missing — we take what we can get.
It’s a performance of unexpected authority. Elio prowls the villa, almost jumping out of his own skin with an awareness that this is his prime moment in life.