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khaleesiumblr · 4 years

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Call me by your name

Call me by your name is a 2007 novel by American writer André Acimen. In 2018 the novel was awarded the Academy Award for Best Writing Adapted Screenplay. The novel is one of the best gay fiction and best-selling novels of 2018.

The story is set in northern in the summer of 1983 in italy. Elio Perlman, a 17 year old Jewish-American, lives with his parents in rural northern italy. Elio’s father, a professor or archeology, invites a 24 year old postdoc graduate student teaching at Columbia, Oliver Armie Hammer’s, who is also Jewish- American, to live with the family over the summer and help with his academic paperwork. This novel is hot. A coming of age story, a coming out story, proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation and something of an epitaph.

The story is a tale of adolescent sexual awakening, set in a very well appointed home of an academic, on the Italian Riviera, in the mid 1980s. Elio, the precocious 17 year old son of the esteemed and open minded scholar and his wife, falls fast and hard for Oliver, a 24 year old postdoc teaching in Columbia, who has come to the mansion for six weeks to revise his manuscript on Heraclitus since this is a novel about time and love before publication.

Elio is smart, nervous, naïve, intriguing, but also bold; Oliver is a handsome, seductive and breezily American, given the phrases like “Later”, and abundantly O.K. With being jewish with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, and with his friends.

Elio has apparently been more or less heterosexual until Oliver arrives, but in fewer than 15 pages he’s already in a state he calls the “swoon”. He lies around on his bed in the long Mediterranean afternoons hoping Oliver will walk in, feeling fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this and i’ll die if he doesn’t knock at my door, but i’d sooner he never knock than knock now. I had learned to leave my french windows ajar, and i’d lie on my bed wearing only my bathing suit, my entire body on fire. Fire like a pleading that says, please, please, tell me i’m wrong, tell me i’ve imagined all this, because it can’t possibly be true for you as well, and if it’s true for you too, then you’re the cruelest man alive.

But it is true for Oliver, and he does knock, and then things really heat up. What Elio and Oliver do to a peach. Aciman, who has written so exquisitely about exile, loss of Elio’s adoration for the lost city of Oliver’s body and the lost city of the love between the two men. He builds these lost cities with the extraordinary craftsmanship of obsession, carefully imagining every last element of Elio’s affair with Oliver, depicting even the slightest touches and most mundane conversations with a nearly hyper-real attention.

My favorite part of the book was Oliver and Elio’s loving pact to call each other by their own names, but at the end of the day Oliver left Elio with pride. So the reason for leaving Elio, is either societal fear or Oliver’s straight orientation however, in one particular scene he asks Elio to come towards him, shows his affection and then shuts the door. And there is this heart to heart conversation between Elio and His father about the loss, the sorrow, the excruciating pain in Elio’s heart. And his father said We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything what a waste. Which is like the quote “ value yourself enough to choose to be with someone who wants you as much as you want them, and letting go may be tough but you can’t hold on to someone that isn’t yours. What i’ve learned is that to value others more is to first love and value ourselves because you’ll regret putting others on top rather than prioritizing yourself first.

After Oliver left Elio, Elio cried as her mom escorted her back home. After a long time of not seeing each other, Call Me By Your Name actually ends twenty years after Elio and Oliver's first meeting, and reveals that after Oliver leaves at the end of the summer, the two never again rekindle their romance. Oliver gets married and has two sons, and Elio has very little contact with him in the interim years.

How can you not love this book? I can firmly say that this book is ranked as my number 1 book of the decade. A phenomenal love story that beautifully captures the troubles of figuring out one’s sexuality in an unapologetically realistic way. I guarantee that you will love this book as much as i love it, and i would want to recommend this book to anyone who likes fictitious novels about love, tragedy, loss, pain and freedom. And please know how to value yourself, love yourself because you are amazing inside and out.

-Dacumos Cyrus Lee M.

ABM 11 - N106 ST SCHOLASTICA

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cmbynreviews · 6 years

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Call Me by Your Name" – A love story fueled by strangers' chemistry

“You’ll be meeting in the man cave”, the publicist said, pushing open the door to the ground floor of a villa set in the lush gardens of the Sunset Marquis.

Previous hotel guests have included members of Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, and while they might never have visited the man cave, it seemed to bear homage to them, or to hair metal, or to hetero teenage boys, or to something. It had a pool table, a guitar, plenty of booze, a framed print of a nude body-painted woman, and another of a skull enveloped in flames. Darkened windows kept out the California sun.

By any measure, it was a curious spot to interview Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, the stars of Call Me by Your Name, due Nov. 24, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story about two young men who fall in love during an idyllic sunlit Italian summer decades ago.

Arriving at the cave moments later, Mr. Chalamet and Mr. Hammer took in the décor with a few chortles, and then Mr. Hammer beelined to the guitar and began strumming, as Mr. Chalamet threw himself onto a big L-shaped couch. The pair have fallen into an easy camaraderie that extends most places they go. For a good chunk of the film’s shoot last year in northern Italy, and in the days leading up to it, they were often the only ones who spoke English, which helped them forge a connection that crackles through their scenes. They have also been promoting the film together, on and off, since its triumphant premiere earlier this year at Sundance, where it sent festivalgoers into a swoon.

“It’s gotten to the point”, Mr. Hammer said, “where we finish each others’ ——”

“—— sentences”, Mr. Chalamet chimed in.

“Sandwiches”, Mr. Hammer replied.

In the film, which is based on the 2007 novel of the same title by André Aciman, Mr. Chalamet plays Elio, a whipsmart 17-year-old American-Italian who lives with his family in an Italian villa, and Mr. Hammer plays Oliver, a 24-year-old American graduate student who arrives to intern with Elio’s professor father for the summer. Elio is immediately intrigued by Oliver, and soon finds himself torturously in love, and fruitlessly trying to fight it, at least at first. Set in 1983, and directed by Luca Guadagnino, whose previous films include last year’s A Bigger Splash and I Am Love (2010), the film is languid and intoxicating, a visual feast of dappled light, polo shirts and era-appropriate songs, from the Psychedelic Furs and the soundtrack to Flashdance.

Mr. Guadagnino is a master at hitting all five senses, which is one of the reasons critics have warmly embraced the film.

“It is more a terrarium of human experience, a sensory immersion that is remarkably full in its vision”, Richard Lawson wrote in Vanity Fair. He continued, “Each shot is busy with existence, but Guadagnino does not overwhelm”.

What also makes the story quietly remarkable, especially for a film that has traction in the awards race, is that it is simply about two young men who fall for each other, without menacing rednecks wanting to pulverize them or a ravaging disease lurking in wait. “It’s just a love story, and it’s really humanizing”, Mr. Hammer said. “No one gets beat up, no one gets sick, no one has to pay for being gay”.

Though the lovers’ age difference has drawn some attention, the film has largely been a source of deep gratification for its key players. It represents a return to the screen for James Ivory, 89, who wrote the screenplay with echoes of his 1987 love story, Maurice. It is making a name for Mr. Chalamet, who is 21 and strongly tipped for an Oscar nomination. And for Mr. Hammer, 31, the time spent making the film in Italy was, he said, “the most transformative experience” of his professional life.

“I’ve never experienced total immersion like that”, Mr. Hammer said. “I’ve never experienced a sense of safety like that. I’ve never experienced a sense of making yourself so accessible and vulnerable”. He added, “It opened my eyes to a whole new sense of understanding, and life, and what it is to be human”.

He and Mr. Chalamet were cast separately and did not set eyes on each other until they met in Italy, on the set. Mr. Guadagnino said he felt so deeply connected to each actor individually “that I took it for granted they must have a great connection too”.

Mr. Guadagnino found Mr. Chalamet “ingenious”, ambitious and intent on challenging himself in roles, he said, adding, “He never goes for the easy way. He goes the very complicated way”. And the director had been angling to work with Mr. Hammer since the actor appeared as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network in 2010. “He carries a sense of infectious seductiveness to him, and a buoyancy, and a beauty”, Mr. Guadagnino said. “But it is also intertwined with a very beautiful internal turmoil”.

He was proved right with the actors’ chemistry – their characters’ attraction is shot through with a fraught competitiveness – even though Mr. Chalamet and Mr. Hammer are as strikingly different in person as they are onscreen.

“It was the luck of the universe, or something, that there was just a natural bond as humans”, Mr. Chalamet said.

Mr. Chalamet is slight and pale, a bundle of boyish energy and birdlike alertness, with a delicate face topped by a black tumble of curls. He grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, the son of a former Broadway dancer and a French editor, attended LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, and appeared in Homeland, Interstellar and the Off Broadway play Prodigal Son.

Mr. Hammer is 6-foot-5, with Ken-doll features (“the textbook guy for shaving-cream commercial looks”, noted GQ), a sardonic mien, and a voice that booms with assuredness and authority. His great-grandfather was an oil tycoon, and he grew up in the Cayman Islands and Los Angeles. He said he wanted to be an actor after seeing Home Alone, when he was 12.

Mr. Chalamet, who also appears in Greta Gerwig’s new film, Lady Bird, said he was drawn to the role because it felt like “an honest look into a young person’s existence”.

“Nobody knows me”, he said, with a laugh, ��so it didn’t feel like too much of a risk because it didn’t feel like my performance in this sort of piece of work was being compared to anything else”.

Mr. Hammer had greater trepidation, and was not sure if he was good enough for such a stripped-down, emotionally honest film, with no set pieces or special effects. “This movie lives and dies in the moments between these characters”, he said. There was also a lot of nudity in the original script, though it was revised, and Mr. Hammer, somehow, had never done a sex scene.

He is also a relative newcomer to smaller-budget films. After his appearance in The Social Network, he landed major roles in movies like The Lone Ranger (2013) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015). But Mr. Hammer found the box-office expectations stifling and the Hollywood machine depressing. “It was like, ‘He’s tall, he’s conventionally handsome, so let’s put him in these big movies and try to build this brand’” he said, “and it just didn’t work”.

He resolved to make smaller films, and his first one was last year’s The Birth of a Nation, which ended up being bittersweet for him, too. The drama, about Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, sold for a record $17 million at Sundance, but was engulfed in controversy after decades-old rape allegations against the filmmaker and star, Nate Parker, emerged. It was a crushing experience that Mr. Hammer said he was still recovering from.

“It seemed clear-cut to me that there was a lot of atoning and apologizing that needed to happen that just didn’t”, Mr. Hammer said, his voice catching. “And that was really tough because we watched this movie that we did, that we all felt was important, just kind of drift away”. (The film’s fall did not dent his career, and while promoting Call Me by Your Name, Mr. Hammer was also filming On the Basis of Sex, a movie starring Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)

In the meantime, both men say they have been relishing promoting this film, even if some reactions come from left field, like a tweet by the actor James Woods suggesting the age difference between the characters was pedophilic. “Didn’t you date a 19-year-old when you were 60?” Mr. Hammer wrote back, in a tweet that went viral, to his great surprise. (Mr. Woods began dating a 19-year-old when he was 59.)

“I didn’t think anybody really cared what I said, I didn’t think anybody cared what James Woods said, you know?” Mr. Hammer said.

Mr. Guadagnino said any chatter about the age difference amounted to an “artificial topic”. No one took issue with the age difference in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, he pointed out, where Jennifer Grey was playing a 17-year-old and Patrick Swayze’s character was 24. Also in Call Me by Your Name, he said, it is Elio who goes after Oliver. “The person who chases is 17”, he said.

Mr. Hammer recalled another surprising reaction. “Someone mentioned to me: ‘Timothée has to put his hand on your crotch in the movie. How did that feel?’ And I was like, do you ask every woman in a movie how it is to have her ass slapped, or her boobs fondled? It’s that double standard kind of thing”.

Mr. Chalamet interjected, “I’ve been very encouraged by the nature of the conversations that I’ve had, and by the lack of questions that are tunnel-visioned in their understanding of sexuality and life and love”.

Mr. Hammer said, “Because the reality is, Timmy grabs my crotch all the time”.

CARA BUCKLEY | THE NEW YORK TIMES | 17 Nov 2017 | (Photo: Ryan Pfluger)

#Call Me by Your Name #Guadagnino #timothee chalamet #armie hammer #andre aciman #james ivory #reviews #CMBYN #Elio #Oliver #Perlman #Chiamami col tuo nome

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gossipnetwork-blog · 6 years

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Peter Travers: 'Call Me By Your Name' Is Sexiest Film of 2017

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/peter-travers-call-me-by-your-name-is-sexiest-film-of-2017/

Peter Travers: 'Call Me By Your Name' Is Sexiest Film of 2017

Here’s the movie of the year for incurable romantics, a rapturous ode to first love that sweeps you up on waves of dizzying eroticism and then sweetly, emphatically leaves you emotionally shattered. For almost a year, Call Me By Your Name – the latest from Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash), a master cinema sensualist – has been a sensation on the film festival circuit. Now this ravishment of image and sound finally goes into wide release. You do not want to miss it.

Set in northern Italy in the summer of 1983, this love story transports you to a place where passion and memory collide. Elio Perlman (a flawless Timothée Chalamet; remember the name) is 17, multilingual, musically gifted and skilled at flirting with the local girls near the villa of his parents – an American professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his translator wife (Amira Casar). Then an intern arrives from the U.S. to assist his father with research into Greco-Roman culture. He’s Oliver (Armie Hammer), 24, a handsome, athletic charmer and an outrageous flirt. At first, the slender Elio is irritated by the visitor’s attention-grabbing body and his American slang, always saying “later” instead of goodbye. Then an attraction develops, slowly, fiercely and irrevocably.

At first, Elio and Oliver dance cautiously around their unspoken attraction. On a bike trip to the town square, they make teasing loops toward and away from each other. Stopping at a war monument, with the camera observing them at a distance, Elio and Oliver can’t yet verbalize the magnetism their bodies can’t help making plain. The yearning is almost palpable, with both men running off with local girls as a means to test the other. Sex is everywhere in this Italian Eden, where a swim, a hot glance or a stroll among the apricot trees has the impact of an aphrodisiac. But the bond between Elio and Oliver goes deeper. The older man waits for the younger one to make the initial move, and when it happens the floodgates of carnality and confusion open wide. Kudos to Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory – 88 and still alive to the thrill of nuance – for giving these scenes time to play out and resonate. Exploitation isn’t the point here; connection is. “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” says Oliver, seeking an intimacy beyond the physical.

Bring out the superlatives to describe the prizeworthy performances of the lead actors, who instill their roles with fire, feeling and flashing humor. You may be shocked by what the duo do to a juicy peach, but you can bet on those stolen moments earn their place in the sex-in-cinema time capsule. Still, it’s the film’s wisdom and nurturing compassion that stay with you. What Elio and Oliver discover in each other opens their eyes to a world beyond themselves. Hammer (The Social Network, J. Edgar) is a revelation, giving his most complex screen role to date the tightrope thrill of full immersion. And Chalamet, who can also be seen right now seducing Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird, is nothing less than the acting discovery of the year. Watch as the ends credits roll and he holds the camera in reactive closeups that will wreck you. And all praise to Stuhlbarg, who is poetic and profound in a crucial scene of empathy in which a father openly encourages his son to follow his true nature, risks be damned.

Working from Andre Aciman’s justly acclaimed 2007 novel, Guadagnino revels in the pleasures of the flesh without losing touch with thought and feeling, while the gifted cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom covers this garden of temptations in seductive light and shadow. The film’s emotions are as naked as its bodies. In the book, Elio and Oliver meet again after 20 years. In the film, Guadagnino shows us only what is; it’s up to audiences to take the film home and keep it close.

The movie is bound to be compared to such recent gay film landmarks as Brokeback Mountain, Carol and the Oscar-winning Moonlight. But this masterpiece goes its own transcendent way. With Oliver, Elio feels he can talk about “things that matter.” The beauty part is that these “things” matter to all of us, regardless of sexual orientation, when we’re gutted for the first time by that thing called love. As Elio’s father says of the art he studies, “there’s not a straight line in any of these statues; they’re all curved, as if daring you to desire them.” Call Me By Your Name dares its audience in the same way. It’s a swooning new classic and one of the very best films of the year.

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cmbynreviews · 6 years

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"Call Me by Your Name" is an erotic film in every sense of the word. It’s also a masterpiece.

It is not easy to put Call Me by Your Name into words. Luca Guadagnino's new film, which adapts André Aciman's 2007 novel about a precocious 17-year-old who falls in lust and love with his father's 24-year-old graduate student, is remarkable for how it turns literature into pure cinema, all emotion and image and heady sensation.

You could call Call Me by Your Name an erotic film, then – and it absolutely, undeniably is. But I mean it in a way that's broader than our modern narrow usage of the term: not just sex but also love, which is bigger and more frightening. Eros is a name for a kind of love that's equal parts passion and torment, a kind of irrational heart fire that opens a gate into something longer-lasting. But it's love that also feels, in the moment, like hurtling headlong off a cliff.

I can't remember a film that better captures that kind of madness and heightened attention to not just the object of desire but also the world at large. Nor can I recall a movie that more directly appeals to all of the audience's senses to make them feel what's happening onscreen. It's undoubtedly a gay love story, though it's less about coming out than coming of age. Call Me by Your Name is a lush, heady experience for the body, but it's also an arousal for the soul.

· Call Me by Your Name drips with desire as it spins a story of first love Set "somewhere in northern Italy" in the summer of 1983, Call Me by Your Name lingers over six sun-soaked weeks in which everything shifts for Elio (Timothée Chalamet). Cocky and preternaturally sophisticated – but with a hint of the insecure teenager still hanging around him – Elio joins his doting, unconventional parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) at their comfortable ramshackle Italian villa, where they prepare to welcome their annual guest, the latest in a series of graduate students who spend the summer working with Elio's father, a classics professor.

This summer that student is handsome, confident Oliver (Armie Hammer), who has a way of taking up space: He's very tall, for sure, but his very presence seems to fill the spaces he's in, whether it's on the court in a casual volleyball game, at a local bar, or dancing in a crowd on the town square. Whereas Elio affects a studied aloofness, Oliver plunges into everything, clumsily destroying one soft-boiled egg at breakfast the first morning, then downing another while murmuring his appreciation, a man of ravenous desire only sometimes held back by a veneer of gentility. He refuses another: "I know myself", he says. "If I have a second, I'm gonna have a third, and then a fourth, and then you'll just have to roll me out of here".

Elio looks on in wonder as this happens, both disgusted and fascinated by Oliver, who barrels out of rooms hollering, "Later!" Oliver's frank American confidence is an inverse of Elio's quieter impishness. The two couldn't be more different.

The chemistry between Hammer and Chalamet, and their performances, sells the relationship completely. (They're true starmaking turns for both actors, along with Stuhlbarg in a brief but key scene). But the spark between them takes a while to fan into a flame, especially since Elio has taken up with a French girl named Marzia (Esther Garrel) who's in town for the summer. Oliver and Elio's relationship starts out combative, with Elio navigating whatever's happening inside of him by feigning disinterest, playing coy, and watching Oliver from afar while taunting him up close. Eventually they become friends. But one evening his mother reads from a 16th-century French romance, in which a knight yearning for a princess with whom he's formed a friendship wonders, "Is it better to speak or to die?" And Elio decides he has to speak.

We know (and Oliver and Elio and Elio's parents know) that this can't last forever, but in capturing the burn, Guadagnino makes us feel Elio's desire, and thus his devastation. Every image practically drips with longing: a live fish someone's caught in the river, pages flapping in the hot breeze, water pouring from a tap into a stone pool, a table spread with breakfast preparations, the smoldering end of a cigarette. And, of course, the bodies of beautiful young people, which seem to have very little shielding them from the hot Italian sun.

In this film, as in earlier ones like A Bigger Splash and I Am Love, Guadagnino's sensual attention to the textures and smells and intimate noises of Italian life builds out a cinematic world that encompasses his characters but is much greater than them. (It's no accident that Heraclitus's The Cosmic Fragments, philosophical texts about the world rather than just man, makes a brief but pointed appearance.) The score mingles all kinds of music together – notably, John Adams's "Hallelujah Junction", the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way", and two original songs by Sufjan Stevens – and it feels like this movie is sparkling, as if you're watching it in 4D. It's intoxicating.

It's also pointedly Edenic, capturing a paradise that will inevitably be lost – but how pregnant with weighty joy and fullness the paradise is in the meantime; the inevitable loss seems only to heighten this. In A Bigger Splash, paradise falls when the snake of jealousy winds its way into the bliss; in Call Me by Your Name, it's the simple, inevitable parting mandated by the ways that age and culture and station will keep Elio and Oliver apart.

· Call Me By Your Name draws on ancient themes while mingling together deeply human experiences The name of the film, and a pivotal moment in it, comes from Oliver pleading in a whisper to Elio, after they've finally slept together, for him to "call me by your name, and I'll call you by mine".

It feels like an odd request at first, until you remember an idea that surfaces in Plato's Symposium: that in Greek mythology, humans were created as four-armed, four-legged, two-faced creatures, but split apart by Zeus and condemned to spend life searching for their other halves. In the Symposium's rendering, whether one searches for a female or male half has to do with the nature of your original being, and there are various means through which two halves who find each other might live in companionship.

But "when one of them meets with his other half", it continues, "the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment". This is the highest form of love – "the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another". This is, in other words, an origin story for what we moderns might call soulmates, and it hums through Call Me by Your Name like electricity.

Ancient sculptures of figures who, as Elio's father puts it, "dare you desire them" recur throughout the movie, strengthening the allusion to the ancients. And it mixes the pagan with the idea of a Garden of Eden – when Elio and Oliver spend their first night together, it's certainly explicit at first, but then the camera pans out the window to rest on a tree. And a piece of juicy, luscious fruit shows up in a key, unforgettable scene that weaves together the natures of desire and guilt.

But unlike the story of the Garden of Eden, there's nothing like sin in Call Me by Your Name's vocabulary – or at least, nothing puritanical. (One assumes, watching the film, that a puritanical thought has never entered Guadagnino's head). This isn't a film about wrongdoing and punishment; it is about love, loss, and piercing joy in the context of a gay romance.

Elio's father, speaking to him near the end of the story, lays out the movie's sense of what's right and what's wrong: "Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once", he says. "And before you know it, your heart's worn out. And as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now, there's sorrow, pain. Don't kill it, and with it the joy you've felt". It is worth wading into desire, the movie suggests; it's the only way to be alive, both in the good parts and the painful ones.

The way Call Me by Your Name intermingles lust and love, desire and selflessness, flesh and soul is fully in service of Eros, but it isn't just about sex, though that's certainly a big part of it. It's also trying to make us feel a mingling of souls that have found each other, and evoke the exhilaration of that meeting. It summons an erotic orientation toward the world with all its power, and then pours it onto the audience. It is, undoubtedly, Guadagnino's masterpiece.

ALISSA WILKINSON | VOX | 22 Nov 2017

#Call Me by Your Name #Guadagnino #timothee chalamet #armie hammer #andre aciman #james ivory #reviews #CMBYN #Elio #Oliver #Perlman #Chiamami col tuo nome

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