Gay love film fails as a gay love story
Luca Guadagnino’s new film, Call Me by Your Name, does everything it is supposed do — well, almost everything.
Based on the 2007 novel by André Aciman and set in the Italian countryside during summer in the late 1980s, the film has Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) meet and fall in love in what feels almost like a two-hour-and-12-minute dream sequence — a dream sequence that is difficult to wake from, as it would be preferable to exist there for just a bit longer.
Guadagnino’s film is every bit as intoxicating as you would expect from the laudatory reviews. And with Chalamet and Hammer (now Golden Globe and SAG nominees) at the helm, it’s nigh impossible not to leave the theatre nostalgic for fresh apricot juice and a warm Italian summer.
But in the context of today’s cultural conversation about queer representation, it may leave something to be desired, especially after the director’s comments about why he didn’t include any explicit sex scenes, although sex between the two main characters is a central theme in the book. His reasoning furthers the supposition that in order for queer stories to be marketable, they must be presented in a way that will not alienate straight audiences.
“I wasn’t interested at all,” Guadagnino explained in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “The tone would’ve been very different from what I was looking for. I wanted the audience to completely rely on the emotional travel of these people and feel first love. I didn’t want the audience to find any difference or discrimination toward these characters. It was important to me to create this powerful universality, because the whole idea of the movie is that the other person makes you beautiful — enlightens you, elevates you. The other is often confronted with rejection, fear or a sense of dread, but the welcoming of the other is a fantastic thing to do, particularly in this historical moment.”
Perhaps Guadagnino’s hesitancy comes in part because LGBTQ folks of his generation (Guadagnino is 46 and openly gay), were less likely to see such blatantly queer narratives — such as LGBTQ characters leading a film, as opposed to being relegated to one-liner sidekicks — represented in popular culture. He seems to believe that by making a film more palatable for straight audiences, it would be able to move the needle.
However, the media available for consumption in a postmillennial digital age has become increasingly queer, so the film would have needed to be less hetero-normalized to move it more. We’re now in a post-Moonlight, post-Carol, post-The Kids Are All Right, post-I Love You Phillip Morris, post-Brokeback, post post post world. Guadagnino would have done greater justice to the film and its audience to deliver a more vivid depiction of queer life — which is more complicated than the film would have you believe.
In her recent book How to Fall in Love With Anyone, Mandy Len Catron writes: “When it comes to love, I’m no longer interested in annihilating the differences. I want to engage with alternative love stories without co-opting them, without heteronomalizing them, and without saying, ‘Here’s what we (straight, monogamous, cisgendered, able-bodied people) have to learn from them’ — even though I do think there is a lot to learn.”
If Guadagnino is attempting to find “universality” in Call Me by Your Name, then he isn’t doing justice to the story. In fact, he’s doing the opposite. If the mainstream, the majority, is to learn to accept queer narratives, it must be able to see them in unfiltered, honest ways, even if that means working through initial discomfort.