The Times Literary Supplement by The Times

Author:The Times
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The Times
Published: 2017-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

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Summer of love

ROZALIND DINEEN | 1015 words

Luca Guadagnino's films tend to be set in Italy, among wealth and privilege, in drenching sunlight, beside beautiful bodies of water. Every element is in perfect taste. Love and lust are the themes. With such a combination, the director runs the risk of ending up with a sanitized, over-idealized picture, an arty rom-com. Yet Guadagnino uses the stunning scenery as a set for acute emotional realism. In Call Me By Your Name he achieves a new level of stylistic impossibility, this time by convincingly rendering the condition of being an adolescent in the 1980s as something both chic and tasteful. It is also his finest film to date.

The subjects of Guadagnino's films reek of privilege and one of the many things that seem to bring the director joy is parsing the different strata of lucky people. In Call Me By Your Name, we have a palazzo in northern Italy where an academic (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his beautiful wife (Amira Casar)- who reads in German, and translates into English, while muttering in French - live. They are Jewish, Italian, American; the palazzo is inherited and kept in the charming nonchalant way reserved for those who can afford not to care, where even the underside of the staircases are beautiful. They have a teenage son, Elio (an outstanding performance by Timothée Chalamet). And every year they take in a PhD student to help with research. This summer, the summer of 1983, that lodger is Oliver.

Oliver (Armie Hammer) is exactly as broad and as tall and as tanned as an Adonis should be. When he dances with girls at the local disco or brushes his hair from his face all the light shines on and from him. Elio is pale and scrawny. A talented musician, he spends much of his time transcribing music from cassette tape. But he is loved.

For Elio's parents are loving; exceedingly so. They are also nurturing, liberal and understanding.

And their son is deeply, quietly confident. He is not intimidated by Oliver, as perhaps he should be - a beautiful, entitled American who downs the apricot juice in one, takes a "pass" on dinner, disappears without a by-your-leave but with a "later". Already conversant in French, Italian and English, Elio takes Oliver on like a fourth language, soaking him up, and commenting on him through mimicry. The teenager sees the adult's cool bravado - played with nuance and sensitivity by Hammer - as just that, and gently undermines it. When they fall in love, things are not at all straightforward; there is rejection and hesitancy and play and pining. But Elio reacts to difficulty with vulnerability rather than defensiveness. This is how he gets entirely under the skin of Oliver, and the viewer. When his adolescent declarations come out in the town square there is nothing trite about them, in fact they become lyrical: "Because I wanted you to know"; "Because I thought you should know"; "Because there's no one else I can say this to but you".

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