Review of Call Me by Your Name (2017) by Alireza13 — 21 Feb 2018

“What do you do around here?” the tall, strapping Oliver (Armie Hammer) asks Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the 17-year-old giving him a tour of the charming Italian village where Oliver will be living for the next six weeks. “Wait for the summer to end,” the bored-seeming Elio says with a sigh. “And what do you do in the winter? Wait for the summer to come?” Oliver shoots back. That only gets a chuckle from Elio, but that line nails the initial mood of Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous new romance, which follows a deep connection that springs out of those restless days of late adolescence.

The intimacy Guadagnino (and James Ivory, who wrote the film’s script) finds in these characters is present from the beginning, but Chalamet (a 21-year-old budding superstar whom I knew best from an old season of Homeland) is the audience’s way in, as a boy on the verge of adulthood who develops immediate, if confused, attraction to the confident Oliver. Not long after the two first meet, Elio retires to his room and reclines in his bed, looking at the tuft of hair sprouting from his armpit, and lazily blowing on it.