Call Me By Your Name [112 points / 12 votes]
“Film is an audio-visual medium. In principle, it offers only sound and images, engaging our ears and our eyes.
“Apparently nobody told Luca Guadagnino this.
“More than any other director working today, he consistently engages all the senses. In Call Me By Your Name, you can feel the sun on your skin. You can taste that peach. You can smell the teenage hormones.
“If there’s one quibble I have with the film, it’s that it seems to agree a little too much with the wonderful speech given by Michael Stuhlbarg in the end. His wistful monologue frames the affair between Elio and Oliver as the ultimate romance, profound and rare. It’s true that most of us – alas – could only dream of such a perfect, bold, bittersweet affair when we were teens. It’s also true that the romance is about more than just teenage lust, and maybe even about more than infatuation.
“Still. It’s not not about teenage lust, and the silly things it makes us do. It’s not not about the fact that Oliver, faced with a perfect soft-boiled egg, confesses that once he indulges in something he finds it impossible not to over-indulge. And in Luca Guadagnino’s sensual cinema, affairs of the mind are incomprehensible: love is impossible to separate from the act of love. It includes tearfully staring into a fire, but it’s also messy bodily fluids and unbearable embarrassment and the smell of your crush’s underpants and the illicit thrill of wearing their shirt. It’s also the delicious, unbearably ache of their absence.
“Call Me By Your Name is undeniably sweeter than the first two films in Guadagnino thematic trilogy about desire, Io sono l’amore and A Bigger Splash. In those films love was more mature, uglier. More violent, too. But the strength of Call Me By Your Name is that it never becomes too saccharine. Oh, it will make you long for long lazy summers in Italy – the cinematography is lush, the landscapes and towns are gorgeous, and the food looks simply amazing. And it will make you look back nostalgically to the silly things you did as a teen. But I doubt many viewers will truly want to be teens again, because the film is clear eyed about the fact that this intensity of feeling has drawbacks too.
“Thus, we end the film with that shot of Elio, crying into the hearth. Summer’s over. But as the memory of his affair with Oliver will stay with Elio, the sensations of this film stay with us.” ~ Hedwig van Driel
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