First Love
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Although set in 1983, the film of Aciman’s novel is reminiscent of the sort of thing that happens in novels of the 19th-century Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. (Indeed, the first chapter of Aciman’s new novel, Enigma Variations, is a rewrite of Turgenev’s First Love, with a gay twist.) Brokeback Mountain was a shock when it appeared—such a shock that its failure to get the Academy Award for Best Picture, even though Ang Lee got Best Director, made many gay people suspect homophobia. (The Oscar went to Crash instead.) Call Me by Your Name arrives at a time when the coming out story has been told so often it now requires a variation—the sort that Moonlight (which did win the Oscar last year) provided, with its story of a gay black man growing up in the projects in Miami.

Call Me by Your Name is a classic tale not just because of Turgenev. It also brings to mind the film Picnic, in which a hot stud arrives in a quiet place and sets all hearts aflutter. In Picnic, it was William Holden. In the new movie, it is Armie Hammer: two men with the same sort of golden good looks. The plot inevitably centers on one question: “When are they going to do it?” But the conversion of the teenage son Elio’s hostility toward the American visitor with whom he must now share a bathroom—never has pissing with the door open been more dramatic—to acceptance, admiration, and desire takes its time, which makes the movie something of a slog. In a porn film online, you can skip the set-up by forwarding to the scene obligatoire; in Call Me by Your Name one has to go through a slow buildup, which some will find enthralling and others irritating.

All the frustrations and cruelty of adolescence are here, certainly: Elio tossing on his bed, writing his feelings down in his journal, dealing with a girlfriend who becomes inconvenient after he falls for Oliver. All this takes place in so sensuous a setting, moreover, that on first viewing one might think the main subject of the movie is Italian country life. Call Me by Your Name is the sort of film that makes you want to move to Europe when you’re in college, but seems when you’re older more like a spread in Italian Vogue. Dining in an orchard, bicycling through a perfect Italian town, sun bathing in big dark glasses, admiring the poor gasping fish the groundskeeper has just caught in the river, dredging up ancient statues from a lake, and meanwhile moving fluently from English to French to Italian, the very existence of the Perlman family turns into lifestyle porn.

The movie reflects, one assumes, the sensibilities of three artists: novelist Aciman, screenwriter James Ivory, and director Luca Guadagnino. Ivory is the man who, along with his late partner Ismail Merchant, filmed three novels by E. M. Forster—A Room with a View, Howards End, and Maurice—the latter the novel that Forster chose not to publish in his lifetime because of its homosexual subject. In an interview with Variety, Ivory says the presence of a big country house was one of the things that drew him to the project. Guagdanino’s previous film, A Bigger Splash, was set on a Mediterranean island (as is Aciman’s novel) where the sensual pleasure of life was also front and center, though cut by a violent denouement. In Call Me by Your Name, there is no violence, only desire. Yet there’s a glamour to this movie that competes with the bare bones of a precocious teenager’s romantic angst. The novel is written in Elio’s voice. The camera changes first to third person. And shorn of Elio’s intellectual introspection, the details of the Perlmans’ existence are so tasteful that it’s a welcome jolt of reality when Elio reaches over and puts his hand on Oliver’s crotch.

Truth to tell, the first time I saw the film, it was so confusing that I had to ask friends afterwards what they thought it was about. “Desire,” the first friend said, adding: “though it doesn’t say anything about desire.” The second said “First love,” the third, “A blissful dream of Jewish family life.” But even after surrendering on a second viewing to the subtlety of its many fine touches, and the effectiveness of Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Elio, there was still something about the movie that baffled me.

Much is made, for instance, of both men’s girlfriends, especially Elio’s. The very day of his big date with Oliver, the one they both know means they will finally have sex, Elio has as much sex with his girlfriend as he can, as if to reassure himself of his heterosexuality. But it’s Oliver he wants, and Oliver wants Elio. Is that homosexuality or bisexuality? Aciman has dealt more than once with the latter subject in his writing. (Enigma Variations is narrated by a man attracted to both men and women, who share precedence in alternating chapters.) In the novel, Elio is obsessed with Oliver for the rest of his life; in the film we see his heartbreak only at the moment it begins, in the very last scene.

But what a scene that is! Like Brokeback Mountain, Call Me by Your Name is saved by its ending; it is magnified, pulled together, taken to another level. But if the former’s finale was clear and remorseless, the latter’s is confusing (spoiler alert): Time has passed; Elio has just learned that Oliver is getting married. As he stares into the fire—like Isabel Archer, in Portrait of a Lady—we see Elio in a remarkably long shot finally understanding his plight, just the way Isabel does. And the knowledge is equally shattering. Isabel has learned her husband has betrayed her. Elio has learned that Oliver is moving on. Behind him, they are setting the table, and calling him to dinner, but if he turns around they will see the tears in his eyes. Still within the family, he has been ejected from it. He’s grown up. He’s eaten of the tree of knowledge.

But what exactly? Everyone I talked to after this movie said that it was beside the point to wonder whether at movie’s end we are to understand that this was a relationship between two gay men, or two bisexuals, or simply a modern version of the ancient Greek pederasty in which an older man mentored a younger one for a while. “It was simply First Love,” one friend said. “You don’t have to know,” said another. But I think you do.

Are we to conclude in the last scene that Elio is gay and Oliver straight? Or both are gay, but one has decided to live a straight life? Or both are bisexual? Or they were only attracted to each other? There is something closeted, dare I say creepy, about the film, and it has something to do with the father. The numerous references he makes to the culture of ancient Greece imply that Elio and Oliver’s coupling is part of the tradition of an older man mentoring a younger one (though Elio is the aggressor here). And when the father gives his touching speech of reassurance and understanding to Elio, he confesses to having had a chance at a relationship like the one Elio had with Oliver, a chance he did not take up. In another scene he tells Oliver, as they watch slides of Greek statues, that these beautiful athletes in bronze “almost dare you to desire them.” One can only conclude that the father did not have the courage to do what Elio has done—act on his same-sex desire—but wishes he had. And yet, both the book and film of Call Me by Your Name punish Elio harshly for doing so. The alternative, the father says, would be to feel nothing. Yet Elio’s obsession with Oliver is simply the oldest story in the book: the classic tragedy of unrequited love.

In the speech the father makes to Elio, he quotes the immortal line of Montaigne, who, when asked to explain why he loved his friend so much, replied: “Because it was him; because it was me.” In other words, some sort of elective affinity that defied all categories. And that may be the story of Elio and Oliver. But the film refuses to make their love anything but a sensuous idyll. One can’t know if this is a story of bisexuality or the suppression of homosexuality for the purpose of marriage and starting a family—in the case of both Oliver and Elio’s father—though I suspect that the latter is the subtext of this film.

Indeed, it’s Elio’s parents who preside over this story: welcoming Oliver at the beginning of the movie as they stand there arm in arm, the host couple; setting the table for Hanukkah at the end as the snow falls outside their happy villa. Even more telling is a small, apparently inconsequential scene, midway through the movie. Elio’s mother is translating aloud as she reads a French fable to her husband and son during a thunderstorm. Suddenly the lights go out. She puts the book down—but the camera lingers on the three of them, Elio lying across his parents’ laps in a posture of complete intimacy and love while the rain streams down outside. It is, in a way, the heart of the movie. This is not only a film about a happy family—it’s about a family that forgives, allows, and includes same-sex desire. I think people are flattering themselves on their open-mindedness and sophistication by saying that it’s a film in which a romance just happens to be between two men. Call Me by Your Name depends on its homosexual subject matter. Otherwise, the story would be impossibly banal. It would be simply a story of teen-age awakening, the sort of movie that Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee once made.

The film is so well acted, especially by Timothée Chalamet as Elio—so skillfully done, with so many small fine touches—that it can just be enjoyed as a movie. It’s civilized, humane, and lovely. But one wonders if, absent the father’s speech, there would be anything of interest about the tale. Perhaps that’s the price of assimilation. In his interview with Variety, James Ivory discusses the reluctance of American actors to show their dicks—both Hammer and Chalamet had “no nudity” clauses in their contracts—which must be why their climactic copulation scene is filmed merely as two legs intertwined, one hairy, one smooth, before the camera pans away to a big tree outside their bedroom window. One wonders, in fact, if the warm reception this movie received was due in part to the fact that it allowed reviewers to embrace a film about homosexuality that is so blurred in its specifics.