Already garnering worthy comparisons to Brokeback Mountain and Moonlight, Sundance breakout hit Call Me By Your Name confidently differentiates itself from those towering works by posing one essential question: "Is it better to speak or die?"
Where those aforementioned films chose to be cautious, restrained by time and cultural expectations, Call Me By Your Name answers with full-throated passion, and it's all the more resonant for it.
Its composition is as poetic as Ang Lee's groundbreaking "gay cowboy" epic, and its humanity is as vibrant as Barry Jenkins' nuanced Oscar contender, but Call Me By Your Name defies easy categorizations. It's a coming-of-age tale, a love story, and a heartfelt mediation on intimacy and loss, all wrapped up in one lush, lyrical package.
At times, it almost feels too good to be true -- too kind, too tender, too hopeful -- but given the contentious climate it's being delivered into, that's probably why the film works so well.
Luca Guadagnino's deeply humane adaptation of André Aciman's 2007 novel centers around Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a scholarly 17-year-old who spends his summers at the family villa in Italy with his deliciously liberal parents, who annually host a grad student to help Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg) -- an expat professor -- with his academic research on Greco-Roman culture. Intrigue arrives in the sun-kissed form of Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American who immediately piques Elio's interest and envy.
The LGBTQ love stories that have garnered Oscar buzz in recent years -- Brokeback, Moonlight, Carol, The Danish Girl -- have been typified by repression; the denial of desires and the emotional toll that such self-rejection can take on a human soul.
Call Me By Your Name refreshingly subverts that trend. While there is understandable hesitation between Elio and Oliver initially -- each testing the other's boundaries with increasing boldness as the story unfolds -- their burgeoning relationship is remarkably free of shame or angst, demonstrating subtle awareness of the social mores of 1983, when the film is set, but never straying too far into judgment.
Indeed, during his opening remarks at the screening Mashable attended, Guadagnino emphasized that the primary feeling he hoped to evoke in the film was "joy," and he delivers it in spades -- from the impish way Elio and Oliver wrestle their way into kisses to quieter moments of grace when a character's reaction runs counter to our expectations (a frequent occurrence in a film that feels anything but formulaic).
The auteur knows how to build anticipation as well as any horror helmer, and he takes the time to establish the contentious rhythm between Elio and Oliver over the early weeks of the latter's visit, ratcheting up the sexual tension until their eventual union feels as explosive as it does inevitable.
The main source of friction between the two is the knowledge that Oliver will inevitably have to leave at the end of the summer, but Guadagnino knows precisely when to disperse the air of melancholy before it settles too heavily, dulling its sting with moments of playful abandon as Elio and Oliver discover each other (and themselves).
Rarely is male intimacy portrayed with such honesty on the big screen -- and rarer still from a star like Hammer, whose matinee idol good looks have landed him tentpoles like The Lone Ranger and The Man from UNCLE, but likely also pigeon-holed him.
Still, recent less-than-heroic turns in Nocturnal Animals and Birth of a Nation have demonstrated Hammer's eagerness to play against type, and Call Me allows the actor to deploy such range and sensitivity that we're as susceptible to his charms as Elio is.
Oliver is confident and charismatic enough to set all the local girls' hearts aflutter, but Hammer truly shines in Oliver's moments of unspoken desperation, when it becomes clear that this affair is no mere summer fling for him either.
But the true revelation is Chalamet -- perhaps best known for playing Dana Brody's rebellious boyfriend on Season 2 of Homeland, along with roles in Interstellar and Miss Stevens -- who imbues Elio with precocious wit and coltish energy, at once both awkward and fearless, ravenous and reticent.
It's gut-wrenching to see Elio simultaneously fixated on and repelled by the charismatic American interloper who inserts himself into the teen's life -- the confusion and longing so clearly reflected in Chalamet's gaze that it seems impossible to overlook. If Oscar prognosticators aren't tipping him for a Best Actor nod this time next year, there's something rotten in the state of California.
So raw and potent is the chemistry between the pair that it occasionally feels like we are intruding on stolen moments that we have no business spying on. In places, Call Me is unabashedly erotic, and yet Guadagnino nimbly navigates that tricky terrain without ever venturing into gratuitousness -- simply treating Elio and Oliver's relationship as it deserves to be treated, just like any other cinematic love affair.
Call Me By Your Name is far less concerned with the gender politics of its central couple than it is with the connection between two souls -- a concept that sadly still seems foreign (little wonder the film is a product of France and Italy), but one that adds a welcome depth to Guadagnino's languid narrative (he wrote the script with his I Am Love collaborator Walter Fasano and Maurice's James Ivory), which unspools with all the laziness of a sticky midsummer afternoon.
For a film ostensibly concerned with "the love that dare not speak its name," Call Me has a voice that rings out with perfect clarity -- one that will echo long after the credits roll.
Call Me By Your Name opens in theaters on Nov. 24.
