Review of Call Me by Your Name (2017) by Michaelobe — 24 Nov 2017

Italy, 1983. To the villa of Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), the father of 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet), arrives assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer) for the summer. Everyone loves him: from the maid Mafalda to local beauties. But most of all he is sympathetic to the young Elio, who can not fully determine his feelings for the guest. Italian director Luca Guadagnino presents the adaptation of the novel by André Asiman about the first love and its complexities.

"Call me by your name" - like a long-awaited trip to a country house from a noisy megapolis. Here, the silence of a summer day is broken only by the call for lunch or a horn of a bicycle. Peaches are ripening on branches, pending until they are ripped off. The pool is always filled with water and waits for someone. Here you go out for breakfast, when everyone has already had lunch. And the nights are as hot as everyday life: discos, walking with friends, swimming in the lakes. And in this idyll he invades, americano, riotous and bright, like a wind on a rocky cliff, bringing confusion to Elio's plans for the summer. Oliver introduces the professor's son to new feelings and experiences, which are unknown to him. But Guadagnino does not go into tragedy, he adapts Asiman's novel brightly and sometimes funny. The filmmaker took the best of Asiman's novel and smoothed out the rough erotic edges, so the scenes of the intimate closeness of the characters were shot as decently as possible, and even the episode with peach can not be called very vulgar. Guadagnino removed from the adaptation the girl Vimini, who was sick with leukemia, he decided to concentrate on the feelings of the main characters, and not on the secondary lines. But also the director deliberately excluded Elio and Oliver's meeting 15 years later, so as not to turn the film into a complete statement, but leave a feeling of understatement, as well as between the characters themselves.

During one of the dinners at the villa, one of the Perlman's guest says the phrase: "Cinema is not a reflection of reality, but a filter for it." That Asiman in the novel and Guadagnino in the film created a partly fabulous story of the first love with its difficulties and delights. "Call me by your name" - a coming of age drama (magical in its atmosphere), a movie about growing up through the first experience and about what it means to be alive and free.