Review of Call Me by Your Name (2017) by Nico C — 19 Dec 2017

Is it better to speak or die?

André Aciman's magnum opus is, perhaps, the most controversial novel I ever read-how can a straight man like Aciman write homosexual lovemaking so vividly? Some gay readers have even claimed that it may be the author's deep-seated fantasy that he kept for so long until he released this book. And now, after 10 years since the novel became a canon for LGBT romance, Luca Guadagnino, an openly gay man, had skillfully put into screen every powerful exchange in the literature that finally gave light to that existential debate between Elio and Oliver:

Call Me By Your Name IS NOT A GAY ROMANCE. It is a story of love not by two men but by two beings being vulnerable to each other who explored the boundaries of their beings being one in the search of infinity, the constant desire to be one organic whole. There's a huge reference to the works of Heidegger, Heraclitus, M.C. Escher, and even Descartes, despite not being mentioned directly in the novel, when Elio mocked him and argued that the pineal gland isn't where the soul and body meet.

So how did Aciman write it so well without being gay? Simple, aside from the fact that it isn't a gay novel as I argued, there's a plethora of literature about homosexual love that predates the contemporary notion of homosexuality (see Foucault's repressive hypothesis in History of Sexuality, 1976). History will tell you that there were no sexual labels prior to the rise of capitalism. Same-sex love existed in different parts of the world even before the East meets the Western world. The novel, I surmise, is Aciman's contemporary take on pederasty, noting the age gap between the two main characters and their academic status.

Some critics see the lack of explicit sex scenes and frontal nudity as the downside of the film, that it is an implicit negotiation of the film with its straight audience and that it tolerates the homophobic resistance in cinema culture. Rather, I see it as an asset. Its current accolades could have been different, and even non-existent if not for that decision made by Guadagnino himself. It should be noted that the director revised its original screenplay which includes explicit scenes. At the end of the day, both the novel and the film are not about sex. It is about the passion between the two main characters who transcended their existential tension.

No actor can perfectly fit Elio's precocious nature but Timothée Chalamet. When I first saw the trailer, I said to myself, "they found the right guy." This guy, despite his very young age, will definitely win the most coveted awards this season. Armie Hammer, on the other hand, is the perfect support Chalamet can get. Their chemistry is one of the best on screen.