2018 Film Review: Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Written by: James Ivory
Starring: Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg
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Call Me By Your Name is a tale of discovery and understanding, a coming of age story that covers first love and loss through a lens of homosexuality in a less understanding time. While it is excellently executed in its detail and performances, I also found difficulty engaging with the film on an emotional level, due to its slow pace and restrained passion. However, everything came together in the film's final thesis, which poignantly summarised everything that had happened in the film and everything that can be taken away from it.

*

Elio (Chalamet) and Oliver (Hammer) bond over a hot Italian summer (another good title for this movie) in 1983; Oliver is visiting to be a research assistant for Elio's father, Elio is listlessly reading his way through the summer. The two interact coldly at first, ever-fettered by Elio's insecurities and Oliver's distance, but as they grow closer over conversations of their Jewish heritage and the difference between knowledge and wisdom, they learn how to approach each other honestly and without prior judgement. Romance soon blooms, before being snuffed out by fear, but the two stop fighting their urges and begin to properly fall for each other.

The actors sell the story completely. Chalamet in particular is sublime, wearing just the right amount of passionate agony across his face to convey so much with a glance and not a single word. Likewise, Hammer was fantastic throughout the whole film, able to communicate with just the slightest of body language. Stuhlbarg was a personal highlight, however, always quietly and understandingly observing in the background, and providing wisdom in the film's epilogue that ties the whole film together. This is all really subtle and naturalistic, not feeling like performances at all, just breaths of life from these actors in to their characters.

Likewise, the writing and the direction mesh really well to create a very realistic look and feel to the movie, with a lot of attention to the detail of the actor's expressions and movements, and time taken to make the experience more human. Bite-sized scenes are only snapshots of the summer, such as a political conversation between two opinionated Italians or a game of volleyball between friends, but they carry with them visual details that tell you what's going on beneath the surface of both Elio and Oliver. Once again, it's very precise and believable.

However, this contributed heavily to the film's pacing becoming almost painfully slow at points. I understood the director trying to convey a lot of internal struggles and passions with incredible attention to expression and movement, everything stops for a moment of pure intimacy. For me personally, the spell stopped working fairly quickly, and while Stuhlbarg brought it all back together, I was still taken aback by the iceberg-speed at which the film was moving. I see him trying to build the passion the two characters have for one another, and I can see why it would work for some or even most, but while it stuck the landing for me, the jump was more of a plod. I couldn't always find my way in to the experience with this one, but it was excellent regardless.

The Short Version: Call Me By Your Name is a lot of great acting, great writing, and agonisingly slow pacing. While Chalamet and Hammer's chemistry keep you invested and Stuhlbarg's final monologue sells the entire piece, the realistic, naturalistic approach to the film, combined with drama that was entirely internal, left me struggling to stay interested in several stretches of the film.

Rating: 8/10

Published January 13th, 2018