In the print edition of the current issue of Film Comment, we find Luca Guadagnino saying that “the true generator of the movies I try to make is Jean Renoir, and A Day in the Country is really the alpha and omega of Call Me by Your Name. Because Call Me by Your Name is about the definition of knowledge, how the bonds within a family have the capacity to create an invisible ribbon that unifies people and makes them become, and grow.”
This is “Guadagnino’s most mature, affecting, and intellectually rigorous work to date,” argues Angelo Muredda in Cinema Scope. “Taking inspiration from any number of works about beautiful European youths with good style and hearts full of longing—most explicitly Proust, as well as Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours—Guadagnino’s film drops us ‘somewhere in Northern Italy’ in 1983, where 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is lounging at his parents’ villa just as a summer apprenticeship reels in the improbably handsome American grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer) to study with Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg). Brash in his villa small talk and quintessentially American in his big, sloppy appetite, Oliver turns out to be more circumspect when it comes to what he wants from Elio, with whom he forms a teasing fraternal friendship that deepens into something more substantial and dangerous.”
Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov:
Formerly, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s regular DP, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, took a detour to shoot Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights films, and is apparently going to keep roaming the globe for a while. Shooting sunny summer Italy is a natural fit for his strengths, all verdant greens and non-smothering sunshine; it looks very much like his previous work. The James Ivory screenplay, adapted from André Aciman’s novel, makes a number of good decisions that don’t overplay any motif: the low-key anxiety of Jewishness isn’t overegged, the transgressive romance’s potential consequences not overstated for purposes of potential tragedy. Not everything has to be symbolic or freighted with plot-point meaning, which is a nice change of pace: the ancient statues Oliver looks at speak to sublimated homoerotics, but, really, they’re just material objects. At 130 minutes, the film has time to let summer sit and take its spell: a romance isn’t really even hinted at until something like an hour in. If the film has a potential fault, it’s that every single person in it acts with uncommon decency—no one ever acts or reacts with anything but the most benevolent and compassionate of motives—but I’m inclined to let the utopian vibes take over. The film is romantic in a very classical sense, and the spell works.
“Guadagnino’s work doesn’t center on repressed feelings, or homophobia, or even secrecy,” adds Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “The two find their feelings hard to hide, and as their situation comes to the attention of their friends and family, they discover a kind of acceptance, even something approaching solidarity.”
“Chalamet is the revelation,” declares Alex Frank, also in the Voice. “The skinny 21-year-old born-and-raised New Yorker is a subtle if eye-catching presence in his previous work, including as the young son of Matthew McConaughey’s character in 2015’s Interstellar. Here, he is the heart and soul. ‘We had a lunch together a few years ago and this young man was so vivid that I was immediately attracted by him,’ says Guadagnino. ‘Young people have a capacity of wonderment that I am really drawn to. I like wonderment. I wasn’t thinking, “Can he act or not?” I was more thinking, “This is the embodiment of Elio.”’”
VIDEO
For more reviews, see Critics Round Up, where James Kang has been tracking them since the film’s premiere at Sundance. For 4:3, Phoebe Chen talks with Guadagnino about “his most successful entwinement of story and sensation.” And Time Out’s Joshua Rothkopf talks with Stuhlbarg, whose “climactic monologue (the stuff of which Oscars are made of) is the fall’s greatest cinematic gift.”
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