Review of Call Me by Your Name (2017) by Le W — 30 Dec 2017

Not to be a contrarian, but Call Me By Your Name is a marvelous performance by Timothee Chalamet, trapped in a mediocre literary adaptation of a great novel, by a great director who keeps firing blanks and a screen writer, who should have known better than remove the most important message of the source material.

Let me explain. Chalamet is simply mesmerizing - when he is on screen, the movie sparkles with incredible authenticity. The same cannot be said about Armie Hammer - he is largely wooden and uncomfortable, with an expressed ambiguity of a, well, hammer.

This is the third movie by Luca Gudagnino in wide release and it simply does not live up to the promise of Io Sono Amore (I Am Love), though it is clearly better than the misguided A Bigger Splash. I am a big fan of erratic geniuses (still waiting for a great masterpiece from Allen and Mallick), but in this instance, the editing, self indulgence and simply terrible music (much of it committed by the otherwise note-worthy Suffjan Stevens) make me think that Luca is loosing the plot.

Never mind, it will be a boffo box office, couple of Oscars and all, as it is a (straight) crowd pleaser. The biggest offender, though, is the unassailable James Ivory, whose script makes a curious choice.

It cleaves off the most important part of the Andre Aciman's novel - its final coda. In the movie, we are led to believe that the final contact between the lovers was the telephone call from Oliver, announcing his engagement (to a woman).

So there you have it: it was just a phase for Oliver and merely a summer infatuation for Ellio. Clean, non-threathening ending for the general population. The novel is much more nuanced. They meet again, some years later.

They have kept tabs on each other, if somewhat surreptitiously. But their encounter reveals the true message of the novel: Ellio is a fully realized, if lonely, man. He knows what love is all about. Oliver, on the other hand, is the lost soul.

He has a family and a career, but his life is empty, because his heart stopped beating when he chose mainstream respectability over love that (to this day) does not dare to speak its name very loudly.

.. In Ivory's world, Oliver is the conformist Clive to Ellio's brave Maurice from that eponymous Merchant/Ivory outing. It's a shame a great story got sacrificed yet again to the god of Mammon.

Regardless, everybody is tripping over themselves in adoring this film, so I don't expect many to pay attention to these issues. Maybe just the thinking ones.