This week Angela stepped back into the pilot’s seat, but had to switch things up a few days before the screening because of issues in getting a copy of her intended first film. Fortunately, her second film – Call Me By Your Name, the 2017 romance by Luka Guadagnino, was available and just as appropriate for the day before Valentine’s Day. (I literally just typed “Halloween”…Freudian slip?)
My, my, Miss American Pie, drove my Che…saaaaaaay! American Pie!
The film is set in the summer of 1983, and our protagonist is the precocious 17-year-old Elio, played by Timothée Chalamet (which, incidentally, is French for “eat a sandwich”). Elio is not exactly a fan of wearing shirts.
Carpe abacum…seize the computer, boys! Make that operating system extraordinary!
Elio is American, but he is the son of an academic archaeologist who spends his summers in Northern Italy doing various archaeological things, and who looks alarmingly like a cross between the late Robin Williams and Joaquin Phoenix.
Ah, see your problem here is that you appear to have completely forgotten to eat a sandwich
As he does every summer, Elio’s father has hired a graduate research assistant to join them in Italy to help him do archaeological things, but this year things are different, as Elio and the assistant Oliver begin to develop a close friendship.
Guys, find a girl who looks at you the way you look at a juicy peach, even when you’re wearing a shirt
This puts a bit of a strain on Elio’s relationship with his summer girlfriend Marzia, as it slowly becomes clear that Elio is falling in love with Oliver.
Never mind, gentlemen, it’s a Home Depot knock off
Of course, there is a little bit of archaeology to be done, but seeing as it’s not nearly as exciting as Dr. Jones would have us believe, we spend most of our time dealing with the extracurricular activities of Oliver and Marzia and the family, most of them dedicated to reminding us just how learned and open-minded the whole group is.
Sure, anybody can play Rachmaninoff’s Third, but can you play Chopsticks?
But seriously, the scenes which are intended to demonstrate to us just how gosh-darned learned everybody is are too precious by half. Archaeology graduate students are expected to (and in fact do) know the detailed etymology of the word “apricot”. The family has evening sessions where they read stories to each other out loud in German. Seventeen-year-old boys can play Bach not only on guitar and piano, but they also can readily improvise it as if it had been altered by Liszt, or even as if the altered Liszt version had been further altered by Busoni, all while leading tours of local WWI monuments and quoting Nietzsche in the classic Danish translation and designing a nuclear reactor and inventing the internet so he can go to Wikipedia to explain to his friends who the hell Busoni is, anyway.
The pool is good for three strokes. The peach is jealous.
Eventually, Elio’s impression that Oliver is spurning him leads him to consummate his relationship with Marzia – but only a few days later the two young men hook up themselves and Marzia is given the heave-ho. During one of their sessions of lovemaking, Oliver tells Elio “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine”, which provides us with a title but seems to be terribly questionable as a romantic gesture. It kind of leans directly into a famous Woody Allen quote about masturbation. I don’t know, maybe other people get it.
Do I dare to eat a sandwich?
Later, Elio completes the Summer of ’83 Trifecta – a girl, a guy, and a drupe that he has pulled the pit out of. Jim Levenstein would be proud.
This picture is completely out of sequence, but I can’t stress enough how incredibly rarely Elio is wearing a shirt in this film
Anyway, it eventually comes time that Oliver’s stay in Italy is coming to an end. Despite the fact that they have tried to keep their relationship a secret, Elio’s parents are totally aware and with a nod and a wink arrange for Elio to travel with Oliver to Bergamo, where Oliver is catching his train out of town, for a few days.
Up next, we’ll be introducing the elusive John Galt with an exclusive radio address for his fans, but first…
The two of them have a good couple of days in town, but soon enough it’s time to say goodbye. After Oliver’s train leaves, Elio breaks down and calls his mother to come pick him up. Upon getting home, his father sits him down and gives him a 37-minute speech about how precious love is and how much he wishes that he loved someone like that (thankfully, Mom is not around) and pulling a couple of muscles patting himself on the back for how open-minded he really is to encourage his son to enter into a same-sex relationship with an older man all the way back in 1983. I mean, maybe it’s not 37 minutes, but it sure feels like it. I mean, come on, the movie is basically over, get on with it already!
Of course, the film does have a coda – over Hanukkah (all the characters in this film are Jewish – did I mention they were Jewish? No, I did not, because it’s a complete throwaway in the film) Oliver calls the family to give them some happy news – he’s getting married! Elio, now even more firmly left in the position he has so recently (or, in the life of a seventeen-year old, not so recently) put Marzia into, sits and cries into a fireplace. The end.
The biggest problem that I had with Call Me By Your Name is that almost none of it seems authentic. Everybody is super smart and understanding and patient and socially liberal in a way that seems unrealistic for even Europe given that it is set in 1983. Today? Maybe. But 1983? There’s no real conflict other than circumstances. I mean, Elio completely burns Marzia, and she’s just happy for him and wants to be “friends forever”. The archaeologist has no issue with his graduate assistant seducing his underage (not for Italy?) son, and in fact encourages it. The eponymous “little nothing” is just…weird. And, though a small point, in his speech at the end Dad tells Elio he doesn’t think his mother knows about him and Oliver even though very clearly she does and it’s a lie which serves no purpose. I just don’t understand how one can write this script and then at the very end put that line, however unimportant, in it. It would be almost as if Michael Curtiz had decided to tack on a final line for Rick Blaine: “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Heil Hitler, eh?” OK, not that bad. But still. There are other things which seem sloppy, for instance it certainly seemed clear early in the film that the family only spent summers in Italy, but I’m pretty sure the Hanukkah scene was shot in the Italy house. Shouldn’t they have been somewhere else?
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 