Call Me by Your Name (2017): A Summer That Lasts

The World

Northern Italy, 1983. Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) is seventeen, a musician and reader and general sensory apparatus, spending the summer in his family's villa as he does every year. His father (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of Greco-Roman culture, takes a graduate student each summer to assist with his research.

This summer, Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives.

Oliver is twenty-four, American, physically overwhelming in the way of someone who has never had reason to be self-conscious about their body, easy in the world in a way that Elio — all vibrating inner life and insufficient outer confidence — is not. He takes up space. He says "later" at the end of conversations, casually, as if he doesn't quite owe anyone a proper goodbye. Elio notices everything.

The Desire

Guadagnino shoots Elio's desire for Oliver with the full resources of a director who understands that desire is primarily a physical experience — not psychological, not intellectual, but located in the body, in what the body does when it is near something it wants. Chalamet's performance makes the desire visible without ever stating it: in the way he is arranged in Oliver's presence, the particular quality of his stillness, the effort of pretending not to notice.

The film's first half is this desire, unacted on. The second half is the desire acted on, and the knowledge — available to the viewer before it arrives — that the summer ends.

Timothée Chalamet

Chalamet was twenty-one when the film was shot, and his performance is one of the most remarkable debuts in recent cinema — not a debut, technically, but the film that announced who he is. He plays Elio as a boy becoming, in the course of one summer, something else: someone who has been loved and has loved in return and will carry both as a permanent alteration.

The final scene — Elio alone by a fireplace, the credits running around him, his face cycling through everything the film has been — is held for long enough to feel like a demand. Guadagnino insists you stay with it. Chalamet insists you feel it. The result is one of the most devastating endings in recent cinema, and the image does not move at all.

The Father's Speech

Michael Stuhlbarg's speech to Elio near the film's end — Elio's father telling his son that he knows, and that he is glad Elio had what he had, and that friendship between two people contains more than most people ever find — is the film's gift. It is the speech that almost no gay man received from his father, made into cinema as a form of retroactive reparation.

The speech is Stuhlbarg's greatest moment and one of the most generous things an American film has done for gay men in the past twenty years.

The Italy

Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom shoot the Italian summer with an almost aggressive beauty: the apricot light, the pools and rivers, the peaches hanging on trees in the heat, the particular quality of European afternoons when it is too hot to do anything except wait for evening. The landscape is both background and argument — all this beauty available, and these two people in it, and what could be more natural than what happens between them?

The film answers its own question.

The Music

Sufjan Stevens wrote two songs for the film — "Mystery of Love" and "Visions of Gideon" — that function as its emotional spine. The Stevens songs arrive at moments of feeling that the images have built to but not resolved, and they resolve them. "Visions of Gideon" over the final scene is the right music for it in the way that some film music is simply correct: the song knows what the scene is, and says so.

BoysDo is a platform for the viewer who will look slowly, who will give an image or a film the full weight of their attention. *Call Me by Your Name* is the film for that viewer. It does not rush. It trusts you to feel what it is showing you without being told what to feel.

It is the most sensory film about gay male desire ever made. It is a summer you can return to. It ends, every time, the same way — the fireplace, the face, the credits — and it is different every time.