☆☆☆☆☆
Eroticism and sensuality are qualities that elude filmmakers with embarrassing frequency, but whether you're gay or straight, Call Me By Your Name is bound to make you feel the heat of the passion it portrays and the frank and unabashed way it approaches sex.
Strikingly sultry but never lurid, Call Me By Your Name is also an emotional stunner. Its story is about first love between two men, but it hits such rare notes of longing, discovery and joy that it seems unfair to categorize Call Me By Your Name as a "gay" movie, though it most certainly is a movie about the singular challenges that two men have when they find love with each other.
Some of the challenges, the earliest ones presented in the movie, are the same for everyone: When they meet, neither 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) nor Oliver (Armie Hammer) knows what to do, or whether the other feels the same. Their flirtation is at once overt and subtle; they kid each other, they dismiss each other, they compliment each other, waiting for a response.
Elio lives with his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an American professor of archaeology, and his French mother in a ravishingly gorgeous Italian countryside villa, and each summer the family is visited by a student for six weeks. Oliver is this year's student, and he's both impossibly gorgeous and intensely confident. Elio tries Oliver as a vulgar American, but it's clear there's a fascination there, one that turns out to be mutual.
Elio moves effortlessly between speaking Italian, American English and French, and his sexuality seems equally fluid -- or, at least, uncommitted. Sex is on his mind in a big way, and what he can't try with Oliver he'll try with one of the local girls, Marzia (Esther Garrel), who's more than a little sweet on him.
If Elio is just discovering his sexuality in all its complexity, Oliver seems more adept at knowing -- and hiding -- his. He's comfortable openly flirting with one of Marzia's friends, but it's impossible not to sense that he might have feelings for Elio, whose dazzling intelligence and classical beauty attract him.
Director Luca Guadagnino lets the story amble along, quiet and calm as one of the perfect summer days it depicts, until a bicycle ride through the countryside leads Elio and Oliver to a bucolic spot in which they are able to drop their guarded, tentative airs. They fall in love, and Call Me By Your Name is a genuine rarity in the way it takes their romance seriously and brings to it an air of melancholy familiarity; their relationship is intense, sweet, fraught and sincere.
And sensual. While Call Me By Your Name does blush a little at portraying gay sex with the same forthrightness as its straight sex scenes, it's impossible to deny the intense magnetism on display between Hammer and Chalamet. (They're both straight in real life, a fact that hardly seems relevant except for the convincingness with which they play their scenes.) One scene in particular, in which Chalamet vents his sexual frustration on a peach, is going to have audiences buzzing, but the movie finds steaming sensuality in langorous shots of ultra-masculine Hammer and the more graceful Chalamet doing little but lying in the sun.
For all of its quivering, provocative physicality, though, Call Me By Your Name achieves its most breathtaking potency with the emotional intensity of the affair. The inevitable scene of their departure is heartbreaking, but that pales in comparison to an astonishingly touching scene in which Elio's father opens up to his son about the transience of youth and the importance of love. It all leads up to a final couple of minutes that opens the waterworks with as much ruthless efficiency as the last scene of The Way We Were.
And Call Me By Your Name earns and deserves comparison to great "straight" cinematic romances. Sexual identity aside, no one who sees the movie is going to be unaffected by its portrayal of young romance, which is almost by definition doomed and impossible. And few movies have as emotionally wrenching a final shot as this one.
But sexual identity can't be put aside. Call Me By Your Name by its very nature is rueful about the way gay love was so long spoken about in hushed tones (and, let's be honest, often still is), the way that repression means young people aren't allowed to explore themselves openly and fully. But it's also one of the most joyous movies about love you'll ever see, especially in one moonlit scene in which Elio and Oliver reflect back on how many days they wasted before letting themselves be in love. That one moment is about as close to romantic perfection as you're likely to get in a movie; it's a scene, and a film, to be cherished.
Viewed November 24, 2017 -- ArcLight Hollywood
1930
Strikingly sultry but never lurid, Call Me By Your Name is also an emotional stunner. Its story is about first love between two men, but it hits such rare notes of longing, discovery and joy that it seems unfair to categorize Call Me By Your Name as a "gay" movie, though it most certainly is a movie about the singular challenges that two men have when they find love with each other.
Some of the challenges, the earliest ones presented in the movie, are the same for everyone: When they meet, neither 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) nor Oliver (Armie Hammer) knows what to do, or whether the other feels the same. Their flirtation is at once overt and subtle; they kid each other, they dismiss each other, they compliment each other, waiting for a response.
Elio lives with his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an American professor of archaeology, and his French mother in a ravishingly gorgeous Italian countryside villa, and each summer the family is visited by a student for six weeks. Oliver is this year's student, and he's both impossibly gorgeous and intensely confident. Elio tries Oliver as a vulgar American, but it's clear there's a fascination there, one that turns out to be mutual.
Elio moves effortlessly between speaking Italian, American English and French, and his sexuality seems equally fluid -- or, at least, uncommitted. Sex is on his mind in a big way, and what he can't try with Oliver he'll try with one of the local girls, Marzia (Esther Garrel), who's more than a little sweet on him.
If Elio is just discovering his sexuality in all its complexity, Oliver seems more adept at knowing -- and hiding -- his. He's comfortable openly flirting with one of Marzia's friends, but it's impossible not to sense that he might have feelings for Elio, whose dazzling intelligence and classical beauty attract him.
Director Luca Guadagnino lets the story amble along, quiet and calm as one of the perfect summer days it depicts, until a bicycle ride through the countryside leads Elio and Oliver to a bucolic spot in which they are able to drop their guarded, tentative airs. They fall in love, and Call Me By Your Name is a genuine rarity in the way it takes their romance seriously and brings to it an air of melancholy familiarity; their relationship is intense, sweet, fraught and sincere.
And sensual. While Call Me By Your Name does blush a little at portraying gay sex with the same forthrightness as its straight sex scenes, it's impossible to deny the intense magnetism on display between Hammer and Chalamet. (They're both straight in real life, a fact that hardly seems relevant except for the convincingness with which they play their scenes.) One scene in particular, in which Chalamet vents his sexual frustration on a peach, is going to have audiences buzzing, but the movie finds steaming sensuality in langorous shots of ultra-masculine Hammer and the more graceful Chalamet doing little but lying in the sun.
For all of its quivering, provocative physicality, though, Call Me By Your Name achieves its most breathtaking potency with the emotional intensity of the affair. The inevitable scene of their departure is heartbreaking, but that pales in comparison to an astonishingly touching scene in which Elio's father opens up to his son about the transience of youth and the importance of love. It all leads up to a final couple of minutes that opens the waterworks with as much ruthless efficiency as the last scene of The Way We Were.
And Call Me By Your Name earns and deserves comparison to great "straight" cinematic romances. Sexual identity aside, no one who sees the movie is going to be unaffected by its portrayal of young romance, which is almost by definition doomed and impossible. And few movies have as emotionally wrenching a final shot as this one.
But sexual identity can't be put aside. Call Me By Your Name by its very nature is rueful about the way gay love was so long spoken about in hushed tones (and, let's be honest, often still is), the way that repression means young people aren't allowed to explore themselves openly and fully. But it's also one of the most joyous movies about love you'll ever see, especially in one moonlit scene in which Elio and Oliver reflect back on how many days they wasted before letting themselves be in love. That one moment is about as close to romantic perfection as you're likely to get in a movie; it's a scene, and a film, to be cherished.
Viewed November 24, 2017 -- ArcLight Hollywood
1930
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