It's the moment their relationship changes -- and the moment that the film moves from being a sweetly languorous comedy of observation to something that has become so frankly profound it's impacting the way people live and the choices they make in their lives.
How does a movie that is so outwardly lovely manage to exist on so many levels, to become almost a cinematic Rorschach test that leaves some audiences polarized? I've heard from viewers who are stuck trying to process the age difference between the main characters (which is only seven years in the story and nine years in reality) and from those who criticize the film for being too pretty, too nice, too lacking in dramatic tension. On the other hand, it's become obvious that Call Me By Your Name has left many viewers with the live-altering fervor of someone who has just witnessed a religious event.
Call Me By Your Name has mysteries built on top of mysteries, not the least of which is the way it affects people. In one of the key scenes in the novel, not replicated in the film, Elio and Oliver visit the ruins of a labyrinthine cathedral, and observe how it's built on remnants of its past, and how every time you think you've gone as deep as you can, there's something deeper. Maybe that scene wasn't needed in the film because the whole film is that way: Examine one of its surface-level elements and you discover others you hadn't considered.
There is, for example, that spontaneous decision to ride into town. It's not actually spontaneous. Oliver has been looking for this opportunity for weeks. Elio has been searching for it, too. It comes. Elio dismisses it with a joke. And at this point, conventional wisdom says they'll be in love before the montage sequence is through. But something oddly wonderful happens here, and to understand just how complex it is, you need to go back to the scene just before Elio and Oliver decided to get on their bikes:
Elio's mother (Amira Casar) has been reading him a story from The Heptameron, but the only version she can find is in German. (This family is remarkably lingually fluid, perhaps itself presaging some other fluidity the film explores.) The story is about a a knight who is madly in love with a princess, and she with him, and the predicament they face, which comes down to one choice: "reden oder sterben?" Or, loosely translated: "Is it better to speak or die?"
Elio and Oliver never answer that question for themselves, but the question itself matters, not because it's thematically central to the film, but because for anyone who was alive in 1983 (when the movie is set), "speak or die" must at least unconsciously recall a similar phrase, one that captured the despair, anguish and desolation of gay men throughout the late 1980s and into the following decade, when AIDS ravaged bodies, families and communities: "Silence = death."
And indeed, just a moment later Oliver lifts up his shirt to show Elio an unsightly injury on his otherwise perfect body, a big, black mark that wasn't there just days before. That's the odd and unexpected thing that happens when Oliver and Elio ride into town, and that moment, tossed away almost casually in the film, moves Call Me By Your Name forward in two remarkable, parallel ways.
In one, the love story is presented simply for what it is: Two souls discovering each other and the beauty, pain, obsession and joy of love. The film can be appreciated solely on that level. But there's no way to ignore the proximity of "speak or die" and the lesion on Oliver's torso. There is a callous, imperfect, hostile world outside the villa in which Oliver and Elio spend their perfect summer, and it is peeking through.
The movie moves forward with those separate but parallel approaches in mind -- the straightforward love story and the more distressing subtext -- and they converge in final moments that are so filled with loss, memory, hope, love and pain that for many viewers (and I'll count myself among them) watching the last scenes of Call Me By Your Name is an experience that borders on traumatizing.
But the idea that there is an unseen, grander force at work that will work against these two men, even if they were able to make their relationship work, still lingers at the edges of Call Me By Your Name.
Not long after their first romantic gestures -- which ends with the suggestion of a trip to a pharmacist -- Elio gets a nosebleed. Oliver seems unafraid of the blood or the physical malady, just as Elio was unfazed by Oliver's own injury.
Much later, Elio performs some buzzed-about auto-eroticism with a peach, and the movie begins with a scene that in the book was about the lengths to which Oliver would go to prove his attraction to Elio. The film's exquisite screenplay by James Ivory changes the scene in a breathtaking way: When Oliver discovers what Elio has been doing and offers to eat the peach (which he does in the novel), Elio slaps the fruit away, but Oliver insists. Finally, Elio breaks down and cries, "I'm sick." And Oliver cradles him and holds him and comforts him regardless.
This deeper, richer subtext to Call Me By Your Name is handled deftly: on the surface, it's barely noticeable. But it persists, and also works its way into the first moment Elio and Oliver kiss: "We can still be good," Oliver says, physically dissuading Elio. "We haven't done anything wrong."
Any gay man between 40 and 70 knows those words and the feelings they convey, of denying real love, or at least a real chance, for fear of what lingered. And AIDS, homophobia, the Cold War, Reaganomics, they're all lurking just outside the gates of the Perlman residence, even intruding: the movie is filled with depictions of bodily fluids and discussions of political changes, all the things that will define the years ahead for Elio and Oliver.
Oliver and Elio both see this; they are intensely smart. They know what is happening in the world. But for now, for these six weeks ... it doesn't matter.
Some (including, it seems, studio executives) have faulted Call Me By Your Name for not having a clear antagonist. It has an antagonist, indeed: The world itself. Eventually, it's going to come after Oliver and Elio as it comes after everyone, and what they experienced together may just be a long-forgotten dream after a while. One or both of them is likely to get sick. One might become part of the anti-AIDS movement in the '90s. Who knows? But the idea that all that is lingering somewhere just beyond the little Italian village is hard to shake.
For now, though, there is no judgment. There is no strife. There is only one of the most palpably real depictions of summer in the country I've ever seen.
Truth be told, one of the four times I've seen Call Me By Your Name I watched primarily not to observe the characters but to look at and listen to the backgrounds. Every image, every piece of sound design in the film puts you right there in the Perlman's home, or on a country road with Elio and Oliver. The film creates an enveloping sense of being there, which Guadagnino enhances through very long, static shots, allowing the light and sound and feel of the places to work on us.
The physical beauty hides truths, and one of them is right in front of our eyes the whole time: Oliver. The first line spoken about him is, "He seems very confident," and the film is as much a coming-of-age story about young Elio as it is about the handsome American.
Hammer plays Oliver with such easy charm, such massive self-assurance, that there's never a question that a 6-foot-5, blue-eyed beauty will have everything together. But then there's an unforgettable scene in which Elio tells Oliver what he thinks the American visitor has been doing every night, only to find out how wrong he is.
When, finally, the two lovers must depart, it leads to the most talked-about scene in the movie, between Elio and his father (Michael Stuhlbarg). It is an extraordinary scene, one that deeply affects people, leading into the very last shot of the movie, which is less merely affecting than shattering, because those unspoken threats and difficult realities that the film has been holding at bay come crashing down, if only for the audience.
Call Me By Your Name lets everyone watching bring his or her own feelings into that last shot, which gives us time to process the metaphors, to reflect on our own knowledge of what is coming for Elio and Oliver (this is, after all, a memory piece of a film), and on our own lives and experience. We remember what it as to be 17 or 24, and to know how young that is.
Director Guadagnino has said he'd like to shoot a sequel, but please, no, don't. The whole point of Call Me By Your Name is that it exists in an exquisite, perfect, joyous vacuum. Its last quiet moments give us time to reflect on that possible future, but also to think about what we, individually and collectively, have lost.
And what we gained, because of course we're here now, older, better maybe, smarter sometimes, and we've gained in some way if not all of them. But we think about what it took to gain. What we wish we could go back to.
We think that maybe we will be lucky enough one summer to find an Italian villa where an old woman makes us food every night and we have nothing to do but read and dance and ride our bikes and talk to each other. And to fall in love.
To be young.
And when you strip away all the allusions and metaphors, all the symbols and literary devices that make Call Me By Your Name such a rich and dense and wonderfully multifaceted experience -- when you take those away, that's what you're left with, why Call Me By Your Name is so impossible to forget.
It reminds us how young we were once, and how willing to love and be loved. And how when we were, the world was good. And how when the world was good, we were good.
The first time I saw it, Call Me By Your Name struck me with its brash eroticism, but I realize now that that's not the reason it persists in my heart and in the hearts of so many -- it's because we all long, no matter our age, for one more moment of youthful possibility when who or what we loved would love us back and all would be right in our little piece of the world.
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