There is a consummating rythym in Luca Guadanigno’s ‘Call Me By Your Name’, to which the film dances, and engrosses itself to.
A sultry summer and bright orchards create a quiet yet vibrant millieu to a blossoming romance between two total strangers, whose inescapable bid to rewriting the stars may be the most beautiful of its kind, and yet utterly devastating.
Set in the early 80’s, Guadanigno’s take of Andre Aciman’s groundbreaking novel of the same name, celebrates youth and first love with all their bewildering beauty and heart-rending pain, never dismissing the inevitable truth that the absence of one can never make the other complete.
The narrative focuses its lens on Elio (Timothée Chalamet), a handsome, guileful 17-year old, living with his parents in a jewish home in the Italian countryside. A confident individualist, Elio’s almost otherworldly charm gets challenged upon the arrival of Oliver (Armie Hammer), an american graduate student taking the summer as an intern to Elio’s father, who is an archaelogy professor.
“He seems very confident” notes Elio, acknowledging Oliver’s ineludible presence as he alights from the service car. Barely intimidated, Elio makes the first move to connect with then still stranger, Oliver.
But this connection isn’t right away made to dive to its depths, as both men proceed to allow mundane obligations–albeit rudimentary–get attented to, first–that is, Oliver exploring the sun-kissed allure of the Italian town, Créma, and Elio nurturing a mostly confused romance with girlfriend, Marzia.
It takes a short deal of time, however, for Elio to immerse himself into the curious attraction that is slowly brewing between him and Oliver.
Chalamet delivers an impeccable articulation of Elio. His version of the self-absorbed teenager is perfectly sculpted to a form that both evoke empathy and sensuality, at the same time. James Ivory’s script does not sanitize Elio’s carnal tendencies, and often fully explores it to draw a more realistic suggestions of a teenager’s coming-of-age phase. But this choice is hardly pulled off by Guadanigno’s direction without sense of decency, as sexual intimacy is barely conveyed through display of flesh.
Instead, the film relies on powerful suggestions that create pictographic sensuality for the intimate moments shared by Elio and Oliver. But when the narrative calls for them, torrid encounters are carefully choreographed with proper motivations, so they can deliver the heat and tenderness the scene requires.
This is a film that thrives both in its moments of burning intimacy and emotional disasters, thereby creating a delicate narrative that drenches sentiments in their most absorbing capacities, possible.
Armie Hammer, whose more imposing physique, nearly dwaves Chalamet, speaks with a more charismatic diplomacy. While such expedience sometimes gets him to trouble (drawing the wrong people close, that is), it can’t be doubted that that has what pulled Elio towards him, in the first place.
More than the sexual friction, there is so much more beyond the intimate link between Elio and Oliver, that makes Guadanigno’s vision of transcendent romance, completely affectionate. Here, he crafts a compelling reminder about how love can be too powerful to dismiss form and nature, and ends up with a full-hearted love affair that celebrates all its beautiful and painful entanglements.
The last moments of the film speak of its most heartbreaking truths, the most memorable of which, is an emphatic monologue about acceptance, singularly delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg.
A thorough examination of love’s universality and its utterly absorbing power, ‘Call Me By Your Name’ may have been the most poignant exercise about teenage love, and the impelling wisdom that comes along with it.
RATING: 5/5
5 – Excellent
4 – Very Good
3 – Good
2 – Tolerable
1 – Terrible
‘Call Me By Your Name’ is now showing in select Ayala Cinemas
