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Luca Guadagnino ’s films are all about the transformative power of nature—the way it allows our true selves to shine through and inspires us to pursue our hidden passions. From the wild, windswept hills of “ I Am Love ” to the chic swimming pool of “ A Bigger Splash ,” Guadagnino vividly portrays the outside world as almost a character in itself—driving the storyline, urging the other characters to be bold, inviting us to feel as if we, too, are a part of this intoxicating atmosphere.

Never has this been more true than in “Call Me By Your Name,” a lush and vibrant masterpiece about first love set amid the warm, sunny skies, gentle breezes and charming, tree-lined roads of northern Italy. Guadagnino takes his time establishing this place and the players within it. He’s patient in his pacing, and you must be, as well. But really, what’s the rush? It’s the summer of 1983, and there’s nothing to do but read, play piano, ponder classic art and pluck peaches and apricots from the abundant fruit trees.

Within this garden of sensual delights, an unexpected yet life-changing romance blossoms between two young men who initially seem completely different on the surface.

17-year-old Elio ( Timothee Chalamet ) is once again visiting his family’s summer home with his parents: his father ( Michael Stuhlbarg ), an esteemed professor of Greco-Roman culture, and his mother ( Amira Casar ), a translator and gracious hostess. Elio has the gangly body of a boy but with an intellect and a quick wit beyond his years, and the worldliness his parents have fostered within him at least allows him to affect the façade of sophistication. But beneath the bravado, a gawky and self-conscious kid sometimes still emerges. By the end of the summer, that kid will be vanquished forever.

An American doctoral student named Oliver ( Armie Hammer ) arrives for the annual internship Elio’s father offers. Oliver is everything Elio isn’t—or at least, that’s our primary perception of him. Tall, gorgeous and supremely confident, he is the archetypal all-American hunk. But as polite as he often can be, Oliver can also breeze out of a room with a glib, “Later,” making him even more of a tantalizing mystery.

Chalamet and Hammer have just ridiculous chemistry from the get-go, even though (or perhaps because) their characters are initially prickly toward each other: testing, pushing, feeling each other out, yet constantly worrying about what the other person thinks. They flirt by trying to one-up each other with knowledge of literature or classical music, but long before they ever have any physical contact, their electric connection is unmistakable. Lazy poolside chats are fraught with tension; spontaneous bike rides into town to run errands feel like nervous first dates.

Writer James Ivory ’s generous, sensitive adaptation of Andre Aciman ’s novel reveals these characters and their ever-evolving dynamic in beautifully steady yet detailed fashion. And so when Elio and Oliver finally dare to reveal their true feelings for each other—a full hour into the film—the moment makes you hold your breath with its intimate power, and the emotions feel completely authentic and earned.   

The way Elio and Oliver peel away each other’s layers has both a sweetness and a giddy thrill to it, even though they feel they must keep their romance a secret from Elio’s parents. (Elio also has a kinda-sorta girlfriend in Marzia [ Esther Garrel ], a thoughtful, playful French teen who’s also in town for the summer.) One of the many impressive elements of Chalamet’s beautiful, complex performance is the effortless way he transitions between speaking in English, Italian and French, depending on whom Elio is with at the time. It gives him an air of maturity that’s otherwise still in development; eventually his massive character arc feels satisfying and true.

But Oliver’s evolution is just as crucial, and Hammer finds the tricky balance between the character’s swagger and his vulnerability as he gives himself over to this exciting affair. He’s flirty but tender—the couple’s love scenes are heartbreaking and intensely erotic all at once—and even though he’s the more experienced of the two, he can’t help but diving in headlong.

And yet, the most resonant part of “Call Me By Your Name” may not even be the romance itself, but rather the lingering sensation that it can’t last, which Guadagnino evokes through long takes and expert use of silence. A feeling of melancholy tinges everything, from the choice of a particular shirt to the taste of a perfectly ripe peach. And oh my, that peach scene—Guadagnino was wise when he took a chance and left it in from the novel. It really works, and it’s perhaps the ultimate example of how masterfully the director manipulates and enlivens all of our senses.

There’s a lushness to the visual beauty of this place, but it’s not so perfect as to be off-putting. Quite the opposite. Despite the director’s infamous eye for meticulous detail, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom ’s 35mm images provide a tactile quality that heightens the sensations, makes them feel almost primal. We see the wind gently rustling through the trees, or streaks of sunlight hitting Elio’s dark curls through an open bedroom window, and while it’s all subtly sensual, an inescapable tension is building underneath.

Guadagnino establishes that raw, immediate energy from the very beginning through his use of music. The piano of contemporary classical composer John Adams’ intricate, insistent “Hallelujah Junction – 1 st  Movement” engages us during the elegant title sequence, while Sufjan Stevens’ plaintive, synthy “Visions of Gideon” during the film’s devastating final shot ends the film on an agonizingly sad note. (You’ll want to stay all the way through the closing credits—that long, last image is so transfixing. I seriously don’t know how Chalamet pulled it off, but there is serious craft on display here.)

In between is Guadagnino’s inspired use of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” an iconic ’80s New Wave tune you’ve probably heard a million times before but will never hear the same way again. The first time he plays it, it’s at an outdoor disco where Oliver feels so moved by the bouncy, percussive beat that he can’t help but jump around to it and get lost in the music, lacking all sense of self-consciousness. Watching this towering figure just go for it on the dance floor in his Converse high-tops is a moment of pure joy, but it’s also as if a dam has broken within Elio, being so close to someone who’s feeling so free. The second time he plays it, toward the end of Oliver and Elio’s journey, it feels like the soundtrack to a time capsule as it recaptures a moment of seemingly endless emotional possibility.

They know what they’ve found has to end—we know it has to end. But a beautiful monologue from the always excellent Stuhlbarg as Elio’s warmhearted and open-minded father softens the blow somewhat. It’s a perfectly calibrated scene in a film full of them, and it’s one of a million reasons why “Call Me By Your Name” is far and away the best movie of the year.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Rated R for sexual content, nudity and some language.

130 minutes

Timothée Chalamet as Elio Perlman

Armie Hammer as Oliver

Michael Stuhlbarg as Lyle Perlman

Amira Casar as Annella Perlman

Esther Garrel as Marzia

Victoire Du Bois as Chiara

• Luca Guadagnino

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Andre Aciman
• James Ivory

Cinematographer

• Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
• Walter Fasano

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Review: A Boy’s Own Desire in ‘Call Me by Your Name’

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By Manohla Dargis

• Nov. 22, 2017

You don’t just watch Luca Guadagnino’s movies, you swoon into them. His best-known titles, “I Am Love” and “A Bigger Splash,” feature beautiful people with impeccable taste experiencing haute-bourgeois life intensely. Passion and drama upend those lives, but what’s most striking about these movies is their extraordinary palpable quality. In Mr. Guadagnino’s work, passion and drama are expressed in words, deeds and surging music but also in the vibrant, visceral textures that envelop his characters — the cool marble, succulent fruit, shadow and light, sheens of sweat. These are movies that turn your gaze into near-touch, inviting you to see and almost caress their sun-warmed bodies.

Mr. Guadagnino’s latest, “Call Me by Your Name,” is another ravishment of the senses, though this time there’s a strong narrative tethering all the churning feelings and sensuous surfaces. Like the 2007 novel by André Aciman on which it’s based, the story turns on an affair between Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a coltish 17-year-old American-Italian, and Oliver ( Armie Hammer ), an American in his 20s. Elio lives with his father (a tremendous Michael Stuhlbarg) and mother (Amira Casar) in a villa in northern Italy. Each summer the father, a professor of Greco-Roman culture, invites a student to work with him and stay with his family; this year it’s Oliver who moves in.

Elio and Oliver’s affair begins slowly with each circling the other at a distance, conveying the kind of nonchalance that’s a shield for interest. Oliver proves far better at this part of the game; he knows more than to look too long and too hard. Elio’s furtive, ducking glances, by contrast, tend to linger, hovering in the air like questions. He’s increasingly curious about this new guest, but soon inexplicably (to Elio, at least) irked by him as well, leading Elio to complain to his parents about Oliver’s standard signoff (“later”). But when Elio scribbles a private rebuke in a notebook, chastising himself for responding harshly toward Oliver, it’s as if he were writing an apologetic love letter.

Mr. Guadagnino is very good at catching the indolent drift of long summer days, with their sleepiness and bared limbs. Everyone seems to move in slow motion at the villa, except perhaps the family’s hard-working maid. This languor fits the tempo of Elio and Oliver’s relationship, which evolves over meals, drowsy idylls, a little work and a spontaneous piano recital that becomes an overture to seduction. A gifted musician, Elio easily moves from piano to guitar (much as his family shifts from speaking Italian to French to English), talent that makes him seem at one with the villa’s miles of bookshelves, its velvet sofas, scattered Oriental rugs and tastefully arranged antiques.

It’s an alluring milieu — charming, civilized and perfectly, if a shade too flawlessly, arranged. Here, even a busy breakfast table and the fruit on a tree can seem art directed. Mr. Guadagnino almost can’t help making everything look intoxicating, yet he also makes you believe in this family’s reality. The grand piano isn’t for show and neither are the books or the open affection and respect with which Elio and his parents treat one another. (The movie reminds you how rarely characters read for pleasure, much less listen to classical music.) “Call Me by Your Name” is set in 1983, so no one is staring into a smartphone. And the time frame means that AIDS doesn’t figure in the story, though there’s a suggestion that the closet does.

The story primarily unfolds through Elio’s point of view. The restless camera tags alongside him, showing you what he sees, his erotic reveries and yearning. And it’s Elio who initiates the affair, at least overtly, though Oliver later admits to playing his part in what the story frames as a mutual seduction. Mr. Guadagnino avoids directly engaging the difference in Elio and Oliver’s ages, which might have forced him to explore the underside of his sumptuous surfaces to greater, messier effect. Instead, Mr. Guadagnino leans on beauty, as when Elio’s father poetically speaks to an increasingly agitated Oliver about the “ageless ambiguity” of some male statues (“as if they’re daring you to desire them”).

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Written by James Ivory (the director of films like “Maurice” ), “Call Me by Your Name” progresses through evasions and encounters, with Elio advancing, Oliver receding and their circling narrowing. The two don’t (can’t, won’t) always say what they mean. So Mr. Guadagnino speaks for them by eroticizing their world, making desire visible in the luxuriousness of the setting, in the green enveloping the villa, the gushing waters of a pool and the graceful lines of male statues. When Oliver hungrily eats a soft-boiled egg, cracking the shell and causing the yolk to messily spurt, Mr. Guadagnino’s lyricism slides into comedy; it’s hard to know just how self-mocking the moment is meant to be.

Even so, the lyricism seduces as does fragile, ecstatic Elio. “Call Me by Your Name” is less a coming-of-age story, a tale of innocence and loss, than one about coming into sensibility. In that way, it is about the creation of a new man who, the story suggests, is liberated by pleasure that doesn’t necessarily establish sexual identity. It’s important that Elio and Oliver have relationships with women, though for seemingly different reasons: the overheated Elio sleeps with a girlfriend (Esther Garrel), while Oliver carries on a more performative affair with a local (Victoire Du Bois). The women are not treated with much kindness, but these affairs further complicate the movie’s vision of pleasure’s fluidity.

There are moments when Mr. Guadagnino’s visual choices seem unintentionally in competition with the quieter, intricate emotions that his actors put across so movingly. He can be discreet to the point of coyness (bodies sweat but don’t necessarily grunt), but it is finally the insistent delicacy and depth of emotion that makes these characters so heart-skippingly tender. The charismatic Mr. Chalamet, Mr. Hammer and Mr. Stuhlbarg — whose brilliant delivery of a tricky speech pierces the heart and, crucially, the movie’s lustrous patina — transform beauty into feeling. In one alive, vulnerable and life-altering summer, Elio’s desire finds its purpose. He loves, and in loving, he becomes.

Call Me by Your Name Rated R for discreet lovemaking. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.

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Call Me By Your Name review – gorgeous gay love story seduces and overwhelms

Set during an endless Italian summer, this ravishing drama starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet is imbued with a sophisticated sensuality

T he debt to pleasure is deferred in exquisite style for this ravishingly beautiful movie set in Northern Italy in the early 80s: a coming-of-age love story between a precocious teenage boy and a slightly older man. Their summer romance is saturated with poetic languor and a deeply sophisticated sensuality.

The film is directed by Luca Guadagnino (who made I Am Love and A Bigger Splash ) and adapted from the novel by André Aciman by James Ivory, who had originally been slated to co-direct and has a producer credit. Ivory’s presence inevitably calls to mind his film version of EM Forster’s Maurice , to which this is frankly superior. For me, it brought back Alan Hollinghurst novels such as The Folding Star and The Spell. Call Me By Your Name is an erotic pastoral that culminates in a quite amazing speech by Michael Stuhlbarg, playing the boy’s father. It’s a compelling dramatic gesture of wisdom, understanding and what I can only call moral goodness.

Stuhlbarg plays Perlman, a middle-aged American professor of classical antiquity living with his stylish wife Annella (Amira Casar), in a handsome Italian house with their son, Elio – a remarkable performance from Timothée Chalamet – who is a very talented musician, spending his time transcribing Schoenberg and composing piano variations on JS Bach. Theirs is a cultured household, in which everyone is proficient in English, French, Italian and, for Annella, German. The family is also Jewish. Elio calls them “Jews of discretion”, a sense of otherness that is to serve as a metaphor for concealed sexuality.

Elio slopes and mopes about the huge house as the long hot summer commences, grumpy and moody, not knowing what to do with himself or his directionless sexuality, shooing away flies, frowning over paperbacks, dressed mostly in nothing more than shorts, all shoulder blades and hairless calves. Every year, his dad invites a favoured grad student to spend the summer with the family to help him with research. This year it is the impossibly handsome and statuesque Oliver, played by Armie Hammer , who never wears a pair of long trousers in the entire film. He establishes his academic credentials early on by presuming to correct Perlman’s derivation of the word “apricot”. Both Elio and Oliver are to have romantic associations with local young women, but it is more than clear where this is heading. And when the main event arrives, Guadagnino’s camera wanders tactfully away from their bed, gazing thoughtfully out of the window at the hot summer night.

What is perhaps so incredible is the concept of leisure, a cousin to pleasure, pure gorgeous indolence and sexiness for six whole weeks. No one appears to have very much to do in the way of dreary work, despite the references to typing up pages and cataloguing slides. People sunbathe; they impetuously jump up and go swimming, have unhurried meals al fresco, cycle into town to drink in bars, or play volleyball. The main work-related activity is when Perlman and Oliver go to inspect a sensational discovery: parts of a classical statue recovered from a lake. Hellenic sensuality is resurrected in concert with the not-so-secret sexual tumult emerging all about.

At any one time, nothing is happening, and everything is happening. Elio and Oliver will catch each other’s eye in their adjoining bedrooms or downstairs in the hall; they will casually notice each other changing into swimming costumes. Each of these intensely realised, superbly controlled and weighted moments is as gripping as a thriller. Hammer’s Oliver is worldlier than Elio, but not a roué or a cynic; in an odd way, Elio is more cosmopolitan than Oliver. The visiting American looks like a mix of Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf.

Chalamet’s performance as Elio is outstanding, especially in an unbearably sad sequence, when he has to ring his mum from a payphone and ask to be driven home. (In that scene, Guadagnino contrives to show an old lady fanning herself in the right-hand side of the frame. Was she an actor? A non-professional who just happened to be there? Either way, there is a superb rightness to it.) And then there is Stuhlbarg’s speech advising against the impulse to cauterise or forget pain: “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30.” There is such tenderness to this film. I was overwhelmed by it.

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

Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer star in a lush story of first love and desire.

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Share All sharing options for: 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 b y 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 b y 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 b y Your Name is a lush, heady experience for the body, but it’s also an arousal for the soul.

Call Me b y 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 b y 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 b y 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 b y 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 b y 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 b y 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.

Call Me by Your Name opens in theaters on November 22.

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Call Me by Your Name Is a Masterpiece

In Call Me by Your Name , the gifted young American actor Timothée Chalamet plays Elio, a 17-year-old who spends summers with his academic parents in their airy, rustic villa in Crema in northern Italy. In early scenes, the skinny, long-waisted Elio seems vaguely uncomfortable in his body, as if uncertain what to do with it apart from the de rigueur canoodling with teenage girls who swim with him in nearby lakes and ponds. It’s only when he stares from his bedroom window at the arrival of this year’s summer guest — a young scholar who’ll spend six weeks reading, writing, and working with the professor — that Elio seems to come out of his own head.

The 24-year-old visitor, Oliver ( Armie Hammer ), has an easy, almost arrogant physicality. He’s broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, absurdly handsome. But he’s hard to read. Oliver gives the shirtless Elio a quick shoulder massage and then heads off to play volleyball. Was it innocent or a come-on? Whichever, Oliver’s touch lingers. Elio sneaks into Oliver’s room and sticks his nose into a pair of discarded bathing trunks, inhaling sharply. He puts them on his head. He’s in heaven.

Call Me by Your Name takes place in summer, 1983. It has the feel of something recollected in tranquility, but the eroticism is startlingly immediate. The faithful adaptation of André Aciman’s novel is by James Ivory, but the movie has a different feel than Ivory’s own formal, somewhat stiff work . The Italian director Luca Guadagnino creates a mood of free-floating sexual longing. Oliver never wears long pants, only short shorts or swim trunks, and young men are always doffing their shirts and jumping into sparkling water or riding on bicycles along dirt roads. The flesh tones stand out against the villa’s pale whites and yellow walls — more tactile but on a continuum with the sculptures and oil paintings by men with similar longings centuries ago. Call Me by Your Name is hardly the first film set in Italy to juxtapose youth and beauty and fleeting seasons with ancient buildings and ruins. But I can’t recall such a continuum between the ephemeral and the enduring.

I also can’t remember a filmmaker who has captured the essence of midsummer this way, lazy but so vivid that every sound registers. Sound floats in through windows — of insects and birds but mostly wind. The presence of Nature can be felt in every one of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s frames. It’s reflected in the bodies of the characters. Oliver is hard for Elio — and us — to read. Is he toying with the teenager? Or is something stirring in him, too? In this atmosphere, how can something not be stirring? There’s friction in the uncertainty, heightened when Oliver dances provocatively with Elio’s kinda-sorta girlfriend. The minutes go by and then we’re into the film’s second hour with everything maddeningly —but thrillingly — undefined.

The love scenes between Elio and Oliver aren’t explicit — they only feel as if they are. The title is said in a moment of passion. It’s Oliver’s fervent desire to dissolve his self, to become one with Elio. I should point out that Armie Hammer doesn’t look 24 — more like 29, which he was during filming, and that changes the dynamic. Make of that what you will (17 was above the age of legal consent in Italy), but it’s Elio who finally pushes Oliver over the brink — who calls the question.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Elio’s father, an anthropology professor who gazes intently at his son, seems to know what’s happening — and doesn’t interfere. He and Elio have a revelatory conversation near the end, but it’s the very last shot that stays in mind, all but dissolving the boundary between viewer and actor. Everything in Call Me by Your Name registers momentously, from the scene that definitively raises the question, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” to the ’80s dance numbers to the yearning Sufjan Stevens song over the stunning credits. Chalamet gives the performance of the year. By any name, this is a masterpiece.

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‘call me by your name’: film review | sundance 2017.

Luca Guadagnino's adaptation of Andre Aciman's acclaimed novel stars Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet as lovers in sun-kissed Italy.

By Boyd van Hoeij

Boyd van Hoeij

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There is a scene toward the end of Call Me by Your Name , Luca Guadagnino’s intimate and piercingly honest adaptation of Andre  Aciman’s superb novel, in which a graying university professor in Italy sits down with his puffy-eyed, 17-year-old son for an unexpected talk. Dad quotes Montaigne’s famous phrase about his special friendship with Étienne de La Boetie . His son, who has been very smart academically for some time but only recently experienced an important emotional growth spurt on his way to adulthood, understands that his father is referring to his offspring’s “special friendship” with the handsome, 24-year-old intern from the U.S. who stayed with them for the summer and has just returned home.

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In someone else’s hands, the exchange might have become pretentious, ridiculous or melodramatic and lachrymose, but Guadagnino , most famous for the far splashier features I Am Love and A Bigger Splash , finds exactly the right tone for the material, which is understated and filled with paternal affection. Even viewers who aren’t able to identify the quote by Montaigne, uttered in the original French, will understand that Dad is using a common intellectual interest as a safe way to express a new idea. It is this kind of attention to detail — much of it lifted directly from the book, adapted by Guadagnino with James Ivory and editor Walter Fasano — that provides the film with its unexpectedly deep wells of emotion and surges of insight into human nature and relationships.

The Bottom Line Call me a successful adaptation.

Starring a never-more-sensual Armie Hammer as the intern, the breathtaking Timothee Chalamet (formerly of  Homeland ) as the son and the great Michael Stuhlbarg as the father, this tender and minutely observed queer romance, set in bucolic Lombardy (changed from the Ligurian seaside in the novel), could, with the right marketing, become a breakout title for Sony Pictures Classics.

Professor Perlman ( Stuhlbarg ) is specialized in Greco-Roman sculpture and has a summer intern over every year in the family’s 17th century country palazzo. When the guest arrives, Perlman’s only child, the lanky and studious teenager Elio ( Chalamet ), is asked to leave his bedroom to Oliver (Hammer) and move into an adjacent storage room for the summer. Like the ritual that gives the film its title, this is not an insignificant detail, as the transfer of bedrooms already suggests that Oliver and Elio are closely connected and, to a large extent, at once interchangeable and part of a single, greater whole. 

Initially, the inexperienced Elio doesn’t quite know what to make of the American seven years his senior and the feeling seems mutual. The cinematography from Thai director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom ( Uncle Boomee… , Arabian Nights ) reflects this idea, keeping everything in medium or wider shots and only rarely moving into the characters’ private spaces. The first close-up of Elio , while he intently watches Oliver dance with a girl at a village party, thus arrives as something of a shock. Perhaps even for Elio : Could he be questioning himself, wondering whether he’s jealous?

Since the action is set not only in Italy but also in 1983, this same-sex attraction would not be readily accepted, so the characters need to be eased into admitting what they might be feeling for each other. As in the scene quoted earlier, seemingly innocent elements of culture — Greek statues, medieval novels — are leveraged to discuss certain ideas that cannot be uttered out loud. In one of the film’s most daring choices, the realization that the two might be talking about the same thing is shot around a Battle of the Piave monument on a piazza in a wide shot, Elio’s back toward the camera and Oliver much further back, his face barely visible. The counterintuitive choice places the two men, talking about the love that dares not speak its name, out in the open but because we can’t see their faces clearly, they could be anyone.

The camera moves in for their first kiss, however, a pastoral moment of joy that recalls the discovery of love in the countryside around Cambridge in E.M. Forster’s classic novel Maurice  (Ivory directed the film version in 1987). From that moment on, their relationship develops in fits and starts, as Oliver initially wants to “remain a good boy” and “not corrupt” Elio , but the hungry adolescent wants more. Both also have dalliances with local girls — these subplots have been heavily pruned from the novel — which here feel like ammunition in the tug-of-war between two men destined for each other. Some elegant visual shortcuts, such as the Star of David necklace that Elio starts wearing again after having discovered Oliver also has one (both are Jewish), also help condense some of the novel’s midsection.

The couple’s physical rapport is an essential part of the novel, and the film is extremely sensual, with both leads frequently walking around in just (swim) shorts during the languid summer days. The handful of sex scenes are tastefully shot but short and not particularly explicit, though Aciman’s famous peach scene — Google this at your own risk if you haven’t read the novel — is featured here in modest but unambiguous fashion. The relative discretion about the full physical compatibility of the men could potentially help the film gain a wider audience beyond the LGBTQ community, but feels a little too restrained for who these characters have become by the time they consummate their relationship.

Though Hammer might be the bigger star and he certainly has a juicier-than-usual role here that he clearly relishes, the true breakout of the film is 21-year-old Chalamet . Elio is someone who is experiencing a lot of things for the first time, for which he barely has any words, but Chalamet’s face and body language turn his character into an open book. The minutes-long and wordless final shot, another rare close-up of Elio , is so mesmerizing that it immediately cements his status as one of the world’s brightest young talents. The chemistry between the men is palpable, but what’s more important, they convey their characters’ complex emotions, expectations and thoughts without necessarily opening their mouths.

The rest of the small cast, very much including Stuhlbarg , in that scene mentioned at the start of this review and elsewhere, is also uniformly excellent. A minor detail that will be problematic for audiences in Europe is the mix of languages used, with the Perlmans in the film an unconvincing hodgepodge of Italian, French and American ancestry. The large amount of French dialogue can partially be explained by the fact that the film is a French co-production, though the only actor who convincingly pulls off all the languages she supposedly speaks fluently is Kurdish-Russian actress Amira Casar , who plays Mrs Perlman.

The film’s costumes and production design nail the look of 1980s rural Italy, with Guadagnino actually having shot in and around the picturesque village where he lives. References to political life in Italy, entirely absent from the novel, are also convincing and add texture. Some classical pieces and Sufjan Stevens’ glorious score complete the all-round classy package.

Production companies: Memento Films, RT, Frenesy , Water’s End Cast: Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet , Michael Stuhlbarg , Amira Casar , Esther Garrel , Victoire Du Bois, Vanda Capriolo , Antonio Rimoldi Director: Luca Guadagnino Screenplay: Luca Guadagnino , James Ivory, Walter Fasano , based on the novel by Andre  Aciman Producers: Peter Spears,  Luca  Guadagnino ,  Emilie Georges,  Rodrigo Teixeira , Marco Morabito Director of photography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom Production designer: Samuel Dehors Costume designer: Giulia Piersanti Editor: Walter Fasano Music: Sufjan Stevens

No rating, 130 minutes

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Call Me By Your Name is a gorgeous, intoxicating love story: EW review

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

The setting is gorgeously specific — summer, northern Italy, early 1980s — but the agony and ecstasy of young love are universal in Luca Guadagnino’s intoxicating coming-of-age drama. Seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the precocious only child of an American professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a chic continental mother (Amira Casar), whiles away the endless afternoons as teenagers (or at least soigné European ones) do: playing Bach variations on the piano, reading battered hardbacks by the pool, loitering in the town square or cooling off in the river. So the arrival of grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer) registers as a near-seismic event. A handsome cipher with a face and body uncannily like one of the Roman statues Elio’s father rhapsodizes over in his studies, Oliver proves to be a heedless, half-absent sort of houseguest — “Later” is the signature catchphrase of his many abrupt exits. (And a series of impossibly tiny shorts, in electric shades of mango, petunia, and lime, is apparently the overriding theme of his seasonal wardrobe.) But as Elio and Oliver slowly begin to draw each other out, a tentative friendship forms, and a powerful attraction.

Call Me By Your Name , adapted by Oscar nominee James Ivory from André Aciman’s acclaimed 2007 novel, is in no rush to tell its story. The narrative casts a sort of languorous spell over its two-plus hours, capturing the unhurried sun-drunk rhythm of Elio’s days as his crush evolves from intriguing distraction to full-blown obsession. There are other contenders for his affection, and Oliver’s, too: local girls whose own sidelined desires Guadagnino captures with startling poignancy. The Italian director, best known for stylized sensory feasts like last year’s sleek, brittle A Bigger Splash, is as lavish with his visual gifts as he’s ever been. And he even finds levity in moments like an already internet-famous dance to the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” or in the sheer awkwardness of living inside a teenage body. But there’s a new kind of empathy here—one that allows the winsome Chalamet to shine and pulls surprising new depths from Hammer, an actor whose serene symmetry finally cracks open to reveal the remarkably flawed and feeling human being beneath. (Another much-talked-about moment from the movie’s festival run, a monologue by Stuhlbarg, should go down in scene-making — and screen-parenting — history; it also might earn him an Oscar.) The small miracle of the movie isn’t just that it tells a gay love story with such unreserved tenderness, but that it makes the fate of a romance not meant to last feel like much more than exquisitely framed filmmaking. It’s real life, heartbreaking and sublime. A-

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Film Review: ‘Call Me by Your Name’

'I Am Love' director Luca Guadagnino weaves a beguiling tale of first love, as Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet share a steamy Italian summer

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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As numerous are the ways in which Luca Guadagnino ’s latest (and most personal) film, “ Call Me by Your Name ,” advances the canon of gay cinema, none impresses more than the fact that it’s not necessarily a gay movie at all — at least, not in the sense of being limited to LGBT festivals and audiences. Rather, the “I Am Love” director’s ravishingly sensual new film, adapted from André Aciman’s equally vivid coming-out/coming-of-age novel, is above all a story of first love — one that transcends the same-sex dynamic of its central couple, much as “Moonlight” has.

Acquired by Sony Pictures Classics shortly before its Sundance premiere, this Proustian account of an Italo-American 17-year-old’s transformative summer may not be as commercial as “Moonlight,” but it ought to be a word-of-mouth art-house hit all the same — especially when talk turns to what teenage Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and American summer guest Oliver ( Armie Hammer ) do with a ripe peach.

Had the film been made in 1983, when the book is set, or 2007, when it was published, the steamy forbidden-fruit scene would surely have landed an NC-17 rating. Today, neither audiences nor the MPAA seem quite so squeamish about such demonstrations of passion, no matter how nontraditional. If anything, the scandalous moment should only help the film to reach its fullest potential audience — as will its sun-blissed Northern Italy location.

Embracing the spirit, if not the letter of Aciman’s novel, Guadagnino and co-writers Walter Fasano and James Ivory (of the Merchant Ivory dynasty that brought us “Maurice” and “A Room With a View”) have resituated the action ever so slightly to Lombardy. The film takes place at the Perlmans’ vacation home, a spacious old villa not unlike the one seen in the Patricia Highsmith-esque, Guadagnino-produced short “Diarchy.” Every summer, Elio’s professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) hires a promising young doctoral student to assist with his research. This year, the Jewish family’s house guest is a 24-year-old golden boy of the kind that might once have graced the pages of Physique Pictorial magazine.

Oliver’s arrival stirs something in Elio, though the teen is slow to confront his feelings. On one hand, he’s compelled to spend as much time with the newcomer as possible, serving as his guide on bike rides to town and frequent trips to the local swimming hole. At the same time, he’s protective of his own feelings, unsure how to read Oliver’s casual American attitude (the way his hand caresses Elio’s shoulder, or the aloof “Later” with which he signs off every conversation).

Though viewers are sure to read much into the strange chemistry taking shape between Elio and Oliver, Guadagnino concentrates his attention on the surface: a freshly prepared Italian breakfast, tree branches heavy with ripe fruit, the glowing sun on honeyed skin. But even as he indulges our senses with such details, the subtext becomes impossible to ignore.

Though Elio and his family have spent many a summer in Lombardy, something is different about this one — that much is clear in the way Elio interacts with longtime girlfriend Marzia (Esther Garrel). They’ve known each other since childhood and are so comfortable around one another, it seems a logical next step that they might choose to lose their virginity with one another. But Elio holds back temporarily, bragging to Oliver that he and Marzia could have had sex after a late-night swim, just to see what kind of reaction it gets.

Oliver is interested, but is clearly wary of acting on his desires, since Elio is not only inexperienced, but also his boss’ son. This seductive outsider correctly anticipates that anything physical that might happen between him and Elio will have a lasting impact on the young man’s sexual identity. And yet, the pair brazenly peacock for one another, parading around shirtless and leaving the doors to their shared bathroom ajar — an improvised mating ritual echoed by a low insect buzz that fills the soundtrack.

As played by Hammer, Oliver is the smoldering embodiment of cocky self-confidence, and yet, there’s an endearing vulnerability in the way he needs for Elio to make the first move — setting the tempo for the deliciously tentative courtship dance between them. Meanwhile, relative newcomer Chalamet combines the intellectual precocity and hot-blooded animal energy of a young Louis Garrel, circa “the Dreamers,” distinguishing himself via the character’s mastery of three languages (English, French, and Italian) and two musical instruments (guitar and piano).

As Elio and Oliver’s attraction become more brazen, the question remains how much of their “special friendship” registers with Elio’s parents. The boy’s mother (Amira Casar) certainly picks up on the impact Oliver has had on her son, even going so far as to suggest that the two spend a few days alone together before Oliver ships off to New Jersey. As for Elio’s father, Guadagnino has done justice to one of the book’s key passages, crafting an exquisite scene in which Stuhlbarg’s character bares his soul via a terrific monologue delivered after the boy returns home — putting to rest a question subtly raised earlier in the film, when a homoerotic slide show doubles as a hesitant proposition of sorts.

No matter how intellectually progressive the Perlman family is, no father has ever said something so open-minded and eloquent to his son, and yet, the film offers this conversation as a gift to audiences who might have desperately needed to hear it in their own lives. This splendid conversation makes such an impact, the film could have ended there (the novel follows the characters for years more), though Guadagnino does supply a bittersweet coda that implies how the two leads look back on that summer — further suggesting that the film isn’t a literal rendering of Elio’s experience, but a bittersweet embellishment of his memory. These were the days that shaped him, marked by the intense tastes, textures, and odors that Guadagnino so effectively amplifies for the viewer’s benefit.

Back in Italy, some critics have held Guadagnino’s work in advertising and brand promotions against him, whereas here in the States, audiences hold no such grudges, responding instead to the director’s cinematic virtuosity. Even as he beguiles us with mystery, Guadagnino recreates Elio’s life-changing summer with such intensity that we might as well be experiencing it first-hand. It’s a rare gift that earns him a place in the pantheon alongside such masters of sensuality as Pedro Amodóvar and François Ozon, while putting “Call Me by Your Name” on par with the best of their work.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), Jan. 22, 2017. Running time: 132 MIN.

• Production: A Sony Pictures Classics release of a RT Features, Frenesy Film Co., La Cinéfacture production. (International sales: Memento Films, Paris.) Producers: Peter Spears, Luca Guadagnino, Emilie Georges, Rodrigo Teixeira, Marco Morabito. Executive producers: James Ivory, Howard Rosenman, Tom Dolby, Naima Abed, Nicholas Kaiser, Lourenço Sant'Anna, Sophie Mas, Francesco Melzi d'Eril, Derek Simonds, Margarethe Baillou.
• Crew: Director: Luca Guadagnino. Screenplay, James Ivory, Guadagnino, Walter Fasano. Camera (color, widescreen): Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Editor: Walter Fasano. Music: Sufjan Stevens.
• With: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel, Victoire Du Bois, Vanda Capriolo, Antonio Rimoldi, Elena Bucci, Marco Sgrosso.

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Call Me by Your Name Reviews

Call Me by Your Name skips through time like a dream, or a calcified, powerful memory. Guadagnino succeeds remarkably in working the themes into the craft and, like love that ends too soon, so does the film.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2023

Luca Guadagnino’s lush Italian masterpiece, “Call Me by Your Name,” is full of romantic subtleties: long lingering looks, brief touches, meaning-laden passages read aloud. But nothing is ever fully overt...

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Aug 2, 2023

From the 1980s idyllic Italian countryside to the slow-burn romance, Luca Guadagnino directs a mesmerizingly dreamy summer experience.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

The film is romantic in a very classical sense, and the spell works.

Full Review | Jan 11, 2023

17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet, in his best performance to date) lives with his parents in suburban Northern Italy. Elio's archaeologist papa (Michael Stuhlbarg) invites an American grad student (the always-wooden Armie Hammer), to spend the summer..

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jul 7, 2022

Chalamet rocketed from obscurity onto the Hollywood A-List thanks to Call Me By Your Name, and with good reason: he didnt just give a great performance in the film, he gave the best performance of 2017.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 20, 2022

Call Me by Your Name taps into universal emotions that belong to everyone who has loved, and rewards our experience through luscious filmmaking.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 16, 2022

Call Me By Your Name is a film that captures a human truth in a way like no others.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Mar 4, 2022

While it's the simmering sexual tension that keeps you watching for most of the film, it's only later that you realise this is a character piece about a man's bluster and how his confidence does not make him strong.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 2, 2021

The most humane and kind movie in a year that featured so many others filled with anxiety and darkness.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2021

Chalamet's performance is magnificent - this is the sort of performance that stretches across a lifetime. This is "Hey look we have our own James Dean now" level good stuff here

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 6, 2021

The blossoming romance between these two men, that unfurls over six sun-dappled weeks in northern Italy, is utterly ravishing.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 25, 2021

What the film does with that, thanks to the performance by 2017 all-star Michael Stuhlbarg, is surprising and life-affirming.

Full Review | Apr 13, 2021

Chalamet is quickly becoming one of the most reliable young actors around...

Full Review | Dec 11, 2020

The actors are superbly convincing.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 5, 2020

It's certainly a handsome piece of escapist-touristic fantasy, though I remain skeptical of Guadagnino, who often seems truer to his sideline as a luxury-product advertiser than he does to the narrative and psychological depth...

Full Review | Oct 19, 2020

One of 2017's most engaging and loving films.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 4, 2020

[I]ncredibly seedy and oft-fetishized . . . In the world of Call Me by Your Name, this sort of behavior is literal, and it's abusive.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2020

Chalamet's performance is subtle but thorough, his body language conveys so many feelings... his stare is the reflection of the love he desires. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 3, 2020

[T]here is nothing else in their world of two, no other possible reference ... The film is powerful not in spite of the fact that it's a summer fling, but because of it.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

‘Call Me by Your Name’ Review: Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet Astound in Sensual Triumph

Luca Guadagnino's hypnotic 80s-set romance is one of the best films of 2017.

[ This is a re-post of my  Call Me By Your Name review from the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The movie opens in limited release on November 24th .]

In my four years attending the Sundance Film Festival, I’m not sure I’ve seen anything as purely rapturous as Call Me by Your Name . The new feature film from I Am Love and A Bigger Splash filmmaker Luca Guadagnino chronicles a summer romance that blossoms between a young boy and a visitor in northern Italy, and by the film’s end it solidifies its place as one of the queer cinema greats alongside Carol , Brokeback Mountain , and Moonlight . The film is a tremendously sensual, hypnotic coming of age/coming out tale of first love. Anchored by a phenomenal breakout performance from Timothée Chalamet , Armie Hammer ’s best work yet, and masterful craftsmanship, Call Me by Your Name is an instant addition to the best romances of the 21st century.

Based on the book of the same name by André Aciman , the film takes place in 1983 in Northern Italy, where a 17-year-old boy named Elio is spending the summer in his family’s 17th century villa. His father ( Michael Stuhlbarg ), a professor of Greco-Roman culture, enlists a research assistant named Oliver (Hammer) to come and spend the summer with his family. Elio is transfixed by Oliver at first sight, but approaches the handsome American warily, keeping him at arm’s length. As the summer continues and Elio and Oliver play a game of chicken, daring one another to make the first romantic overture, the two finally give into their feelings and spark a romance that is passionate, playful, and pure.

Chalamet is nothing short of a revelation as Elio. The actor is probably best known for his work on Homeland or for a brief role in Interstellar , but this is one of the biggest breakthrough performances in recent memory. He imbues Elio with complicated layers—a confident exterior; a precocious charm; a fearful undercurrent. All of these shine through and more and he’s so good in the role that at first you even doubt whether he actually likes Oliver. Of course he’s simply preparing himself for rejection by throwing out the first jabs, but this results in a relationship that is at first delightfully contentious, then playfully so before turning into full on flirtation.

But as a closeted 17-year-old, Elio is still working out his feelings by losing his virginity to a local Italian girl who has the hots for him. Their relationship never comes off as phony, more as an exploration, and there’s a ticking clock plot point towards the end of the film that raises the stakes in hilariously sexy fashion.

As the relationship between Elio and Oliver becomes physical, the film really digs into this as a first love story and a coming out story. Love is universal, so the feelings between Elio and Oliver are the same feelings felt by all, but it’s nice that Guadagnino doesn’t ignore the elephant in the room: that Elio and Oliver’s sexuality is a thing to be hidden at that point in time. There’s a reason their relationship began so contentiously, and Oliver makes reference early in the film that he’s “been good” so far and doesn’t want to do anything to mess that up. It’s heartbreaking, really, to see Elio so miserable at the start of the film, surrounded by such beauty.

But this is no misery porn. The teasing that goes on between the two characters is magnificently handled by Guadagnino, who keeps a playful hand on the proceedings so as not to drown the film in self-serious romance. Summer flings are fun! So are first loves. And while this does blossom into something deeply felt, the summer season and Italian setting add a touch of lightheartedness to the scenes. Moreover, Guadagnino’s focus on sensuality over sexuality imbues the film with a romp vibe with an undeniable allure. One imagines that a more explicit or erotic version of the film would have downplayed how deeply felt the emotions are between Oliver and Elio.

Gorgeously shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom ( Arabian Nights ), this is a film that you just want to soak up. The Italian scenery is milked for all its worth, and the days filled with swimming, reading, and eating fresh fruit are divine. But the secret weapon to immersing audiences into the world of Call Me by Your Name is some incredible sound design. The footsteps on the gravel roads, the creaking floors in the ancient villa—you not only see this world, you feel it. That only allows the audience to fall deeper into the film’s trance, becoming infatuated with the romance between Elio and Oliver.

It must be said that  Call Me by Your Name  is a triumph in every regard. Stuhlbarg’s role as Elio’s father isn’t necessarily a large role in terms of screentime, but he delivers a monologue towards the end of the film that felt like it made time stop. Guadagnino and  James Ivory ’s script is measured and tight; thoughtful and delicate. Every inch of this movie is expertly crafted, right down to the stunning final shot. It’s at once a universal story of young love and a relatable, emotional story of a homosexual awakening. In that regard it’s a tremendous love story period, but also a winning entry in the legion of queer cinema.

Call Me by Your Name  opens in limited release on November 24th.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Call Me by Your Name

In 1980s Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father's research assistant. In 1980s Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father's research assistant. In 1980s Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father's research assistant.

• Luca Guadagnino
• James Ivory
• André Aciman
• Timothée Chalamet
• Armie Hammer
• Michael Stuhlbarg
• 1.2K User reviews
• 456 Critic reviews
• 94 Metascore
• 101 wins & 262 nominations total

• Mr. Perlman

• Annella Perlman

• Bambi - Art Historian
• Nico - Art Historian

• Elio's Friend
• (uncredited)

• Astonished Store Customer
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Director's Trademarks: The Films of Luca Guadagnino

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Did you know

• Trivia Timothée Chalamet learned to speak Italian and play the classical piano pieces used in the film.
• Goofs When Prof. Perlman is showing Oliver the color slides of Greek statues sent from Berlin, the fourth one is the "dancing satyr", which was discovered in Sicily in 1998 (the statue is displayed in a museum specially built for it in Mazara del Vallo in Sicily). The film is set in 1983.

Mr. Perlman : 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 make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!

• Crazy credits Although the movie has a full opening credits sequence, the title of the film is not shown on screen until the end credits begin.
• Connections Edited into Funny or Die Presents...: Call Me by Your Twins (2018)
• Soundtracks Hallelujah Junction Written by John Adams (as J.C. Adams) Performed by John Adams Published by Hendon Music Inc. Administered in Italy by Casa Ricordi Srl Courtesy of Nonesuch Records By arrangement with Warner Music Italia Srl

User reviews 1.2K

• naimaislamnodi
• Dec 24, 2020
• How long is Call Me by Your Name? Powered by Alexa
• January 19, 2018 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Instagram
• Gọi Em Bằng Tên Anh
• Crema, Cremona, Lombardy, Italy
• Frenesy Film Company
• La Cinéfacture
• RT Features
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• €4,000,000 (estimated)
• $18,095,701
• Nov 26, 2017
• $43,368,603

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 12 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Movie Reviews

Review: 'call me by your name'.

NPR's Noel King talks with April Wolfe, lead film critic for LA Weekly , about the film Call Me by Your Name. It stars Armie Hammer and is directed by Luca Guadagnino.

NOEL KING, HOST:

The film "Call Me By Your Name" is a coming-of-age story set in the early 1980s about two young American men who fall in love one summer in Italy.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CALL ME BY YOUR NAME")

TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: (As Elio) I can show you around.

ARMIE HAMMER: (As Oliver) That'd be great. Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HAMMER: (As Oliver) So what do you do around here?

CHALAMET: (As Elio) Read books, transcribe music, swim at the river, go out at night.

HAMMER: (As Oliver) Sounds fun. All right, later.

KING: A graduate student played by the actor Armie Hammer falls for his professor's teenage son.

April Wolfe is lead film critic at LA Weekly, and she joins us from NPR West. Hey, April.

APRIL WOLFE: Hi, there. Hi, Noel.

KING: Critics really love this movie, including you...

WOLFE: Yes.

KING: ...Judging by your review. What is the big deal?

WOLFE: This film does romance and a re-creation of falling in love so well that I couldn't help but fall for it. One of the things that I love is this dialogue back and forth of these two men who - they tease one another. And it's sweet. And it feels almost as though we can see their brains kind of syncing in the same way that their bodies are. And to me, that's real love. And a lot of directors, they don't quite know how to portray that on screen.

KING: There is an interesting age difference between the two young men who fall in love. Oliver, the graduate student, is 24. The boy who falls in love with him is 17. What do you think, given the times we're in?

WOLFE: You know, I was uneasy with this for a moment. But it feels like it's presented very differently because it is set in Italy. The age of consent there is 14, and they seem to treat these teenagers as adults who are making their own decisions, who are on their own. From an American lens, it is still a little bit uneasy for me. But at the same time, these two characters, they are both very intelligent. And sometimes the idea of age would just kind of vanish from my head as I was watching it.

KING: So this is a movie that brings to mind some other love stories, like last year's "Moonlight" or "Brokeback Mountain," for example. How does this film feel different from those?

WOLFE: Honestly, I have to say this one feels more like a classic film. Luca Guadagnino, the director, is so good at directing not just what you see and hear but how you feel things, how you smell things. The whole orchard that these characters live in - you know, you feel as though you can smell these peaches and stone fruits that are growing on the property.

KING: That sounds extraordinary. April Wolfe is lead film critic at LA Weekly.

April, thanks for coming in.

WOLFE: Thank you so much.

(SOUNDBITE OF SUFJAN STEVENS SONG, "MYSTERY OF LOVE")

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The Empty, Sanitized Intimacy of “Call Me by Your Name”

By Richard Brody

Luca Guadagnino’s new film, “Call Me by Your Name,” may be progressive in its appropriately admiring depiction of a loving and erotic relationship between two young men, but its storytelling is backward. It is well known, and therefore no spoiler to say, that it’s a story, set in 1983, about a summer fling between a graduate student named Oliver (Armie Hammer), who’s in his mid-twenties, and Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the seventeen-year-old son of the professor with whom Oliver is working and at whose lavish estate in northern Italy he’s staying. Half a year after their brief relationship, Oliver and Elio speak, seemingly for the first time in many months. Elio affirms that his parents were aware of the relationship and offered their approval, to which Oliver responds, “You’re so lucky; my father would have carted me off to a correctional facility.” And that’s the premise of the film: in order to have anything like a happy adolescence and avoid the sexual repression and frustration that seem to be the common lot, it’s essential to pick the right parents. The movie is about, to put it plainly, being raised right.

If Guadagnino had any real interest in his characters, what Elio and Oliver say about their parents near the end of the movie would have been among the many confidences that they share throughout. Long before the two become lovers, they’re friends—somewhat wary friends, who try to express their desire but, in the meantime, spend lots of time together eating meals and taking strolls, on bike rides and errands—and the story is inconceivable without the conversation that they’d have had as their relationship developed. And yet, as the movie is made, what they actually say to each other is hardly seen or heard.

They’re both intellectuals. Oliver is an archeologist and a classicist with formidable philological skills and philosophical training; he reads Stendhal for fun, Heraclitus for work, and writes about Heidegger. Elio, who’s trilingual (in English, French, and Italian), is a music prodigy who transcribes by ear music by Schoenberg and improvises, at the piano, a Liszt-like arrangement of a piece by Bach and a Busoni-like arrangement of the Liszt-like arrangement, and he’s literature-smitten as well. But for Guadagnino it’s enough for both of them to post their intellectual bona fides on the screen like diplomas. The script (written by James Ivory) treats their intelligence like a club membership, their learning like membership cards, their intellectualism like a password—and, above all, their experience like baggage that’s checked at the door.

What their romantic lives have been like prior to their meeting, they never say. Is Oliver the first man with whom Elio has had an intimate relationship? Has Elio been able to acknowledge, even to himself, his attraction to other men, or is the awakening of desire for a male a new experience for him? What about for Oliver? Though Elio and Oliver are also involved with women in the course of the summer, they don’t ever discuss their erotic histories, their desires, their inhibitions, their hesitations, their joys, their heartbreaks. They’re the most tacit of friends and the most silent of lovers—or, rather, in all likelihood they’re voluble and free-spoken, as intellectually and personally and verbally intimate as they are physically intimate, as passionate about their love lives as about the intellectual fires that drive them onward—but the movie doesn’t show them sharing these things. Guadagnino can’t be bothered to imagine (or to urge Ivory to imagine) what they might actually talk about while sitting together alone. Scenes deliver some useful information to push the plot ahead and then cut out just as they get rolling, because Guadagnino displays no interest in the characters, only in the story.

For that matter, Guadagnino offers almost nothing of Elio’s parents’ talk about whatever might be going on with their son and Oliver. Not that the parents (played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) are absentee—they’re present throughout, and there are even scenes featuring them apart from both Elio and Oliver, talking politics and movies with friends, but there isn’t a scene of them discussing their son’s relationship. They don’t express anything about it at all, whether approval or fear or even practical concern regarding the reactions of the neighbors. The characters of “Call Me by Your Name” are reduced to animated ciphers, as if Guadagnino feared that detailed practical discussions, or displays of freedom of thought and action, might dispel the air of romantic mystery and silent passion that he conjures in lieu of relationships. The elision of the characters’ mental lives renders “Call Me by Your Name” thin and empty, renders it sluggish; the languid pace of physical action is matched by the languid pace of ideas, and the result is an enervating emptiness.

There are two other characters whose near-total silence and self-effacement is a mark of Guadagnino’s blinkered and sanitized point of view—two domestic employees, the middle-aged cook and maid Mafalda (Vanda Capriolo) and the elderly groundskeeper and handyman Anchise (Antonio Rimoldi), who work for Elio’s family, the Perlmans. What do they think, and what do they say? They’re working for a Jewish family—the Perlmans, Elio tells Oliver (who’s also Jewish), are the only Jewish family in the region, even the only Jewish family ever to have set foot in the village—and they observe a brewing bond between Elio and Oliver. Do they care at all? Does the acceptance of this homosexual relationship exist in a bubble within the realm of intellectuals, and does that tolerance depend upon the silencing of the working class? Is there any prejudice anywhere in the area where the story takes place?

The one hint that there might be any at all comes in a brief scene of Elio and Oliver sharing a furtive caress in a shadowed arcade, when they brush hands and Oliver says, “I would kiss you if I could.” (That pregnant line, typically, ends the scene.) Even there, where the setting—the sight lines between the town at large and the character’s standpoint—is of dramatic significance, Guadagnino has no interest in showing a broad view of the location, because of his bland sensibility and flimsy directorial strategy, because of his relentless delivery of images that have the superficial charm of picture postcards. Adding a reverse angle or a broad pan shot on a setting is something that Guadagnino can’t be bothered with, because it would subordinate the scene’s narrow evocations to complexities that risk puncturing the mood just as surely as any substantive discussion might do.

To be sure, there’s much that a good movie can offer beside smart talk and deep confidences; for that matter, the development of characters is a grossly overrated quality in movies, and some of the best directors often do little of it. There’s also a realm of symbol, of gesture, of ideas, of emotions that arise from careful attention to images or a brusque gestural energy; that’s where Guadagnino plants the movie, and that’s where the superficiality of his artistry emerges all the more clearly. He has no sense of positioning, of composition, of rhythm, but he’s not free with his camera, either; his actors are more or less in a constant proscenium of a frame that displays their action without offering a point of view.

The intimacy of Elio and Oliver is matched by very little cinematic intimacy. There are a few brief images of bodies intertwined, some just-offscreen or cannily framed sex, but no real proximity, almost no closeups, no tactile sense, no point of view of either character toward the other. Guadagnino rarely lets himself get close to the characters, because he seems to wish never to lose sight of the expensive architecture, the lavish furnishings, the travelogue locations, the manicured lighting, the accoutrements that fabricate the sense of “ order and beauty, luxury, calm, and sensuality .” All that’s missing is the Web site offering Elio-and-Oliver tours through the Italian countryside, with a stopover at the Perlman villa. Instead of gestural or pictorial evocations of intimacy, the performers act out the script’s emotions with a bland literalness that—due to the mechanistic yet vague direction—is often laughable, as in the case of the pseudo-James Dean-like grimacing that Guadagnino coaxes from Chalamet. Even the celebrated awkward dance that Oliver performs at an outdoor night spot was more exhilarating when performed to a Romanian song by an anonymous young man at a computer screen. Hammer is game, playful, and openhearted, but the scene as filmed is calculatedly cute and disingenuous. (Such faults in performance fall upon directors, not because they pull puppet strings but because they create the environment and offer the guidance from which the performances result, and then they choose what stays in the movie.)

There are moments of tenderness—telegraphed from miles away but nonetheless moving, as when Oliver grasps Elio’s bare shoulder and then makes light of it, when he reaches out to touch Elio’s hand, when Elio slides his bare foot over Oliver’s—that are simply and bittersweetly affecting. They’re in keeping with the story of a love affair of mutual discovery that is sheltered from social circumstances, from prejudice, from hostility, from side-eyes or religious dogma—and that nevertheless involves heartbreak. It’s a story about romantic melancholy and a sense of loss as a crucial element of maturation and self-discovery, alongside erotic exploration, fulfillment, and first love. The idea of the film is earnest, substantial, moving, and quite beautiful—in its idea, its motivation, its motivating principle. It offers, in theory, a sort of melancholy romantic realism. But, as rendered by Guadagnino, it remains at the level of a premise, a pitch, an index card.

Near the end of the film, Professor Perlman delivers a monologue to Elio that concentrates the movie’s sap of intellectualized understanding and empathy into a rich and potent Oscar syrup. The speech is moving and wise; Stuhlbarg’s delivery of it, in inflection and gesture, is finely burnished. Here, Guadagnino’s direction is momentarily incisive, in a way that it has not been throughout the film, perhaps because the professor’s academicized liberalism toward matters of sex is the one thing that truly excites the director. The entire film is backloaded—and it’s nearly emptied out in order for him to lay his cards, finally, on the table.

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By Anthony Lane

By Justin Chang

• Sony Pictures Classics

Summary It’s the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, and Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a precocious 17- year-old American-Italian, spends his days in his family’s 17th century villa transcribing and playing classical music, reading, and flirting with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Elio enjoys a close relationship with his father (Mich ... Read More

Directed By : Luca Guadagnino

Written By : James Ivory, André Aciman

Where to Watch

Timothée Chalamet

Armie Hammer

Michael Stuhlbarg

Mr. perlman.

Amira Casar

Annella perlman, esther garrel, victoire du bois, vanda capriolo, antonio rimoldi, elena bucci, bambi - art historian, marco sgrosso, nico - art historian, andré aciman, peter spears, andrew duncan hinojosa, maria caggianelli villani, elio's friend, krystal ellsworth, astonished store customer, critic reviews.

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Call Me By Your Name Gave Me More Than I Thought I Needed From a Movie

The queer romance serves as fantastical wish fulfillment for many of us who missed our chances.

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Warning: spoilers ahead.

Perhaps it was the free whiskey, but my excitement was too obvious. “It’s amazing!” I said. “Its every gay boy’s fantasy: a handsome older college student comes to stay with this 17-year-old’s family for the summer in Italy, they basically have insatiable chemistry, they fuck—I mean, they fuck —and fall in love and it’s beautiful and sun-kissed and gorgeous. And then it all falls apart when the college student leaves at the end of the summer, rendering the younger boy an emotional wreck!”

I reiterated the drama of the last line: “It’s the kind of romance most young gay men don’t get to have until they’re in their mid-twenties, when they’re all stupid and horny and self-absorbed. It’s unreal, yet so believable and tragic.” (I may have also described it, “Like ‘Strawberry Wine,’ only gayer!”)

My synopsis, however, focuses on the story's more salacious details and undermines the point of the book: an immersive, intense love affair between two young men that feels so outside the so-called genre of queer literature. The author, Andre Aciman, is straight; maybe that’s why the usual trappings of a queer story aren’t there. There are no gay-bashings, no AIDS scares, no angry parents reinforcing a sense of shame around the notion of two boys falling in love (and even worse: fucking each other). It's pure love story. That it’s also a period piece (the book takes place in 1987, the film in 1983) makes it even more fantastical. Yet the love story is so fully realized, so intimate, that I was able to look past those narrative glitches and appreciate it for what it is: a beautiful, touching, emotional romance.

The queer subtleties reveal themselves once Oliver, played by Armie Hammer in the film, leaves Elio, played by Timothée Chalamet , to return to America and continue his studies. A distraught Elio, suddenly alone, cannot process his broken heart. There’s no one to console him in the near-empty train station, and there’s no one else he can confide in. He did, after all, spend the summer having a presumably illicit affair with another man. He cannot tell his parents, his friend, his girlfriend. He’s lonely, in every sense of the word, and the loneliest part of being a young queer person is the feeling that you cannot tell those closest to you about experiencing love—and the inevitable pain that results from it—for the first time.

I experienced a similar heartbreak when I went through an early breakup, although I did have close friends who let me cry on their couch without asking for details (but who were ready to listen when I was able to express my sadness with words). I didn’t have my parents, because I hadn’t come out to them. I’d have to first get over the giant wall between us; I’d have to admit to them that I was gay, which was already unfathomable. How would I then immediately be able to tell these people—whom I loved dearly, but from whom I was hiding a deeply important part of my life—that not only was I gay, but I had fallen in love with someone, someone I didn’t think I’d be able to continue to love?

As I sat in the dark theater in Park City as the film’s final moments appeared on the screen, softly crying along with my neighbors, I suddenly remembered the book’s climactic moment between Elio and his father, Mr. Perlman, that leaves audiences feeling warm and optimistic. The film ends with an exchange between actors Timothée Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg, in which the latter delivers a touching monologue that attempts to soften the emotional blow his character’s son is experiencing. Here is a passage from Aciman’s novel, which closely resembles the version in James Ivory’s screenplay:

You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 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!

That’s where I absolutely lost it, feeling overwhelmed by emotion not just because I could relate to Elio’s heartbreak, but because I suddenly realized that was the sort of thing I always wanted to hear from my own father. I never got it. I came out to my parents via email (foolishly, in hindsight). My father was in his last months of pancreatic cancer, and I felt like it was a now-or-never situation—something I had to do no matter how much it scared me. Yet I avoided showing my vulnerabilities (and, likely, so did he) by never talking about it. I’d visit in those last months, trying to keep things as stress-free as possible, and not wanting to broach a heavy subject.

Avoiding it remains one of my few regrets—mostly because I was assuming the worst: that my father didn’t want to talk about it, either, because he, too, was ashamed. Months later, after he died, my mother told me that they of course had conversations in which my father expressed the opposite—that he loved me and cared for me no matter what. I wish I had heard it from him. I wish I had been brave enough to let him tell me those words himself.

Stuhlbarg’s final monologue reminded me of that personal moment, a moment I never got to experience on my own—just as Elio and Oliver’s idyllic, Italian romance is so extraordinary to me. Yet one of the reasons I adore Call Me By Your Name so much (both the book and the film) are those emotional leaps that require just the slightest suspension of disbelief. Cinema can often offer us what we cannot find on our own in our real lives. In the case of Call Me By Your Name , it went beyond portraying a similar experience to my own (a gay man falling in and out of love); it showed me—a 34-year-old gay man—something missing from my own life, the conversation between my father and me. It lifted a burden I didn’t realize I’d been carrying for years. I can only imagine how it must amplify a similar sense of empowerment in a younger viewer who also needs so desperately to hear the words of acceptance he’s longing to find at home.

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Call me by your name, common sense media reviewers.

Strong sexual content, adult themes in gay romance.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The film celebrates love, excruciating agony and a

There aren't any villains here; characters are hum

The film tells the story of a teen boy exploring a

The age gap between the two main characters raises

Several scenes of lovemaking, one between teens an

Infrequent use of "f--k," plus "p---y."

Social drinking at dinner. Two men shown drunk in

Parents need to know that Call Me by Your Name vividly captures a tale of first love. Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, it has strong sexual content. While nudity is brief and fleeting (a woman's breasts, a man's buttocks) and the sex scenes aren't graphically explicit, there are multiple scenes of…

Positive Messages

The film celebrates love, excruciating agony and all.

Positive Role Models

There aren't any villains here; characters are humanly flawed, but almost everyone is accepting of one another's quirks. Though at times immature and thoughtless, Elio is a young person learning who he is. It takes courage for Elio to explore his sexuality and open himself to first love. Elio's father, in particular, demonstrates a great deal of compassion for his son.

Diverse Representations

The film tells the story of a teen boy exploring a same-sex relationship for the first time in a realistic and unapologetic fashion. But the age gap between the two main characters raises potential concerns about predation and harmful stereotypes about gay men. Characters' Jewish faith is depicted as an integral part of their identity.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

The age gap between the two main characters raises potential concerns about predation, but their relationship is depicted as fully consensual.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Several scenes of lovemaking, one between teens and several between a teen and a man in his early 20s. Oral sex is implied at least once. Although sexual nudity is fleeting (breasts, bare buttocks), the sex scenes are quite specific and have significant emotional impact. Non-sexual nudity includes characters shown from behind while changing into bathing suits. In another scene, a character ejaculates into a fruit, which is later handled playfully by someone else.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Social drinking at dinner. Two men shown drunk in one scene (one, who's underage, vomits). Frequent smoking by teens.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Call Me by Your Name vividly captures a tale of first love. Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet , it has strong sexual content. While nudity is brief and fleeting (a woman's breasts, a man's buttocks) and the sex scenes aren't graphically explicit, there are multiple scenes of lovemaking, both between two teens and between a teen boy and a man in his 20s. Oral sex is implied, and there's a scene in which a man ejaculates into a fruit, which is handled after. Teens smoke frequently, and both teens and young adults drink, at least once to excess. The age gap between the two central lovers may raise concerns. Language is infrequent but includes "f--k" and "p---y." The realistic coming-of-age story features characters who demonstrate courage and compassion. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (34)
• Kids say (164)

Based on 34 parent reviews

A film about first love.

What's the story.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, based on André Aciman's novel of the same name, chronicles a precocious teen's first love -- a romance that takes place during an idyllic Italian summer. Young Elio ( Timothée Chalamet ), an American multi-instrumentalist, is with his parents, both academics, on vacation at their summer home. After his professor father's ( Michael Stuhlbarg ) latest grad student resident, Oliver ( Armie Hammer ), arrives, Elio soon finds himself struggling with strong, unexpected feelings.

Is It Any Good?

This romantic drama is more fully and convincingly realized than most cinematic love stories in recent memory. Call Me by Your Name captures that affliction that so many of us have suffered: crazed, unreasonable first passion. The story happens to be about two men, but that's only a detail in this beautiful film in which every element feels as vivid as the lovers' drive for each other. Director Luca Guadagnino richly captures a sense of place, whether in the bright sunshine of an Italian summer or the dying light in one of the house's rooms in early evening. "Vivid" is the word; it all feels as specific as the sharpest recollections of first love: the taste of the fruit that season, the Psychedelic Furs music they dance to at the club, the flashes of weird, inexplicable behavior. That the characters' passion is presumably forbidden (Elio is an older teen, while Oliver is an impossibly perfect grad student in his early 20s) only makes it more potent for those under its spell.

As Elio, Chalamet exudes star quality. The role is demanding: Elio is a gifted multi-instrumentalist who's highly articulate and possesses a kind of unsure charm. That's a lot, and Chalamet delivers it all while losing himself in an unexpected emotional rollercoaster. Hammer, meanwhile, is cast as an all-American golden boy who's all confidence and ease. His Oliver is good at everything, but when he finally tips his hand romantically, he has endearing moments of vulnerability. And everyone should be so lucky to have parents as interesting and understanding as those played by Almira Casar and Stuhlbarg. The dialogue, while highly intelligent, stays emotionally understated until the relationship blossoms, containing itself in all-subtext scenes like a wonderfully choreographed confession staged around a statue in a public square. There does seem to be a moral to this story, expressed in a simple, lovely scene in which Elio's father comforts his son. In celebrating the irreplaceable glory of love in the face of the agony of loss, his father says, "To make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything ... what a waste."

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Call Me by Your Name depicts gay characters. How does it compare to other depictions or typical depictions in Hollywood films?

How is sex portrayed here? Is it loving and respectful? How does the age difference between Elio and Oliver impact their relationship? What are your own values regarding sex and relationships?

What do you think of Elio's treatment of Marzia? Is it understandable, or does it make you like him less?

If you've read the novel the movie was based on, how do the two compare? Which do you like better, and why?

How do the characters demonstrate compassion and courage ? Why are these important character strengths?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 24, 2017
• On DVD or streaming : March 13, 2018
• Cast : Armie Hammer , Michael Stuhlbarg , Timothée Chalamet
• Director : Luca Guadagnino
• Inclusion Information : Gay directors, Middle Eastern/North African directors, Gay writers
• Studio : Sony Pictures Classics
• Genre : Romance
• Topics : Book Characters
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Courage
• Run time : 132 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : sexual content, nudity and some language
• Award : Academy Award
• Last updated : February 6, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Screen Rant

Call me by your name review: a beautiful portrait of first love, call me by your name is a beautiful and powerful coming of age love story with remarkable performances from armie hammer and timothée chalamet..

Directed by Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name is a triumph of film, adapted from the novel of the same name by André Aciman, with James Ivory penning the movie script. Gaudagnino kicked off his feature film career in 1999 with The Protagonists , but rose to prominence with his 2005 film,  Melissa P. He has since also helmed the psychological drama A Bigger Splash (2015), which served as the second film in the director's Desire trilogy - with the first being the 2009 release,  I Am Love, and the final installment being Call Me By Your Name . For Call Me By Your Name , Guadagnino teamed with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and recording artist Sufjan Stevens, the latter of which composed news songs for the film.  Call Me By Your Name is a beautiful and powerful coming of age love story with remarkable performances from Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet.

Call Me By Your Name takes place somewhere in northern Italy at the start of the summer of 1983, when 17-year-old Elio Perlman (Chalamet) meets American academic Oliver (Hammer), who is studying under Elio's college professor father while staying with the Perlmans at their villa for the season. Oliver spends his days working with Dr. Lyle Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), but gets along well enough with the entire family, including Lyle's wife/Elio's mother Annella (Amira Casar) and the family's housekeeper Mafalda (Vanda Capriolo). Elio builds a friendship with Oliver, though they have some setbacks thanks to certain awkward interactions and miscommunications. Meanwhile, Elio spends much of his time with a girl his own age, Marzia (Esther Garrel).

Still, Elio and Oliver grow closer as the summer progresses, bonding over their shared Jewish heritage and love of knowledge. They spend more and more time together, and Elio shows Oliver around the Italian countryside, especially his favorite place to swim and read. After some false starts, the two begin to explore their sexuality together, despite Oliver's reservations and worries about corrupting Elio - as well as his fear that they will be discovered by Elio's parents. As the summer draws to a close, Oliver prepares to depart Italy and return home to the United States. But, he and Elio try to make the most of their remaining time together, with their relationship deepening even further. Still, the two are eventually forced to confront the reality of their circumstances and decide how - or if - they can continue their relationship.

Music plays an important role in Call Me By Your Name , especially since Elio is a musician - his parents often ask him to play the piano when they have guests for dinner - and he spends a great deal of time transcribing music he listens to on a now-vintage cassette player. Whether it's The Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way", which becomes Elio and Oliver's song of sorts, or the original songs by Stevens, Call Me By Your Name uses its soundtrack to set the tone and heighten the emotion of a scene. Rather than disappear into the background, the music of Call Me By Your Name  often calls attention to itself, but in such a way that doesn't distract from the film. Rather, it elevates the movie, helping to cultivate the environment in which Elio and Oliver's story is told, while never overshadowing their story.

Further, the visuals in  Call Me By Your Name , which was shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Mukdeeprom, are truly beautiful. The movie makes exceptional use of its setting in Italy, where the project shot on location, reveling in the lush countryside with lingering shots that allow viewers to fully immerse themselves in the setting. Undoubtedly, the realness of the environment translates to film thanks to Mukdeeprom and Guadagnino's work. They especially put the villa used for the setting of the Perlman family home to good use, letting audiences explore its secret rooms and orchards as Elio and Oliver explore themselves and each other. At the end of the day, the shots of the Italian countryside are meant to serve the story at the heart of Call Me By Your Name , but they also provide a great deal of rich visuals to captivate audiences - and captivate they surely will.

Still, even with beautiful scenery and delightful music, the success of Call Me By Your Name rests on the shoulders of Hammer and Chalamet. Thankfully, both actors deliver entirely compelling and heart wrenching performances as Oliver and Elio. Chalamet plays the precocious young man coming of age and exploring his sexuality, while Hammer portrays a slightly older and more mature, but conflicted, man who is also exploring his feelings of attraction, though both are equally charming in their own ways. The pair are aided by Ivory's script, but it's the little moments between Chalamet and Hammer - their choices in their physicality and the intimacy in their presence together - that truly sells the love story between Elio and Oliver. Call Me By Your Name is a triumph almost entirely thanks to Hammer and Chalamet, whose performances should receive some much-deserved awards recognition this year.

Of course, the lead actors' performances aren't Call Me By Your Name's only strength. In fact, Stuhlbarg offers his own heartfelt turn as Elio's father. Though Elio's parents are more of background fixtures for much of the film, Stuhlbarg is given a monologue at one point that encapsulates his own quietly powerful performance. It's one exceptional moment of many throughout Call Me By Your Name that offers insight into characters who don't often get to be the star of their own stories in Hollywood. The relationship between Elio and Oliver is one some viewers may not be familiar with - while others will know it intimately - but at the heart of Call Me By Your Name is a universal love story, and the tale of someone discovering who they are through that love.

As such, Call Me By Your Name is both familiar and fresh, with all the emotion of a truly fantastic love story, and the development of a remarkable coming of age tale. While there may be those who write off Call Me By Your Name because it features leads who aren't often depicted in mainstream stories popularized by Hollywood - and, on a larger scale, society - in any real way, make no mistake that Guadagnino's latest film offers a coming of age love story to which almost anyone can relate. With the addition of Stevens' enthralling original music (and all the music included in the film) as well as the mesmerizing visuals, Call Me By Your Name  is a truly unique and emotional moviegoing experience - one that will no doubt be a major player in the upcoming awards season.

Call Me By Your Name is now playing in a limited U.S. theatrical release and will expand to more theaters over the forthcoming weeks. It runs 132 minutes and is rated R for sexual content, nudity and some language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments!

Key Release Dates

Call me by your name.

Call Me By Your Name Review

27 Oct 2017

132 minutes

Call Me By Your Name

In his last film, A Bigger Splash , Luca Guadagnino stuck four attractive people in a remote holiday home and set off a sort of lustful Hunger Games , where sex was a weapon in a battle for dominance. Call Me By Your Name is similar in its set-up, but the opposite in how it plays out. It puts two strangers in another impossibly glamorous, isolated home and lights the fuse on their attraction, but this one burns long and slow, not fast and angry. Based on Andre Aciman’s novel, it’s a romance overwhelming in its intensity, a heart that swells until it has to burst.

A full-hearted romantic masterpiece.

Elio (Chalamet) is 17 years old and living in the Italian countryside with his artsy parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar). Handsome, but more boyish than he perhaps believes, Elio is confident and smart, liked by everyone who meets him. Every room he enters is his. But he is thrown off balance by the arrival of Oliver (Hammer), a twentysomething who has come to stay to assist Elio’s father in his work. Oliver looks like the American ideal distilled into a single man. And with his charm, looks and presence outstripped, Elio is immediately transfixed.

Guadagnino’s telling of the development of this romance, which changes both parties, is like the feeling of getting gently drunk. It’s smooth but a little dizzying. He fills every scene with life. Trees are heavy with fruit; people are always eating; the chirping of crickets a constant soundtrack. He thrusts life at you and wills his characters to live theirs. Long summer days drift away in a gentle routine of swimming, cycling and nothing, but each day that passes with feelings unvoiced is a day lost — they will never have it back.

The screenplay, written by James Ivory, is elegant and full of small surprises. The level of attention given to even the smallest of characters means so many of them have an impact even with minimal screen time — Elio’s brief girlfriend breaks your heart with a handful of lines. What few vocal emotional outpourings are present are earned — a paternal monologue by Stuhlbarg in the final minutes is as verbose as the film gets and, good lord, it makes it count (bring tissues). But much is conveyed in the many silences which are entrusted to an excellent cast.

Chalamet is the centre and he gives the kind of performance that immediately sends you to Google to find out where the hell this kid came from (he may be familiar from Interstellar or Homeland ). All Elio’s teenage emotions are raw on Chalamet’s skin. He plays him as a person still forming, not scared by his feelings but surprised. In a film in which every performance is terrific, Chalamet makes the rest look like they’re acting. He alone would make the film worth watching, but he’s just one of countless reasons.

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• Contributors

Call Me by Your Name Movie Review: A Deeply Felt Ode to Unrequited Love 

Written by Spencer Coile

It’s a lazy summer somewhere in northern Italy. The year is 1983, and Elio (Timothée Chalamet) a seventeen-year-old musical prodigy lounges about his house, spending his time transcribing music or reading German poetry with his university professor parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar). Every year, though, his parents take in a graduate student for the summer, and much to Elio’s chagrin, in walks Oliver (Armie Hammer), the “usurper,” as Elio calls him. What initially begins as a contentious relationship between the two, Elio and Oliver bond over shared interests, sunbathing out by the pool, riding their bikes into town together.

To draw upon the specific plot devices of Luca Guadagnino’s latest work would be doing the film a great disservice, because Call Me by Your Name is, if nothing else, a deeply personal experience. Spaced throughout the entirety of the summer of ’83, the film, much like a summer in Italy, takes its sweet time to tell an age-old story about unrequited love and the lengths we go to in order to suppress or express those feelings. James Ivory’s screenplay weaves a tale that seems to meander at first, only to have been following a fascinating trajectory all along.

Having premiered at Sundance almost one year ago, it would be difficult to avoid a discussion of filmmaking in 2017 without addressing the complexities present in Call Me by Your Name. It is hard to avoid chatter about the story of two men falling in love over the span of a summer – one being a seventeen-year-old, and the other being twenty-four. In another year’s time, the “infamous” peach scene will have been talked about ad nauseam. But those are just details in a larger picture that is simply about encountering lust, perhaps love, and the desire to want more. Elio and Oliver’s story is surely specific to the time period, but what is so rich about Guadagnino’s film is the way in which he crafts a love story that feels eerily relatable to real life.

In any classic romance, we witness grand, sweeping gestures – proving one’s devotion through daring acts. Call Me by Your Name is miraculous in the way in depicts young love, because most of it is not about what is said, but what is unspoken. Elio and Oliver express their attraction to one another through tiny acts; it is the smallest touch on the shoulder, unsustained eye contact, the glimmer of a smile that only they share. Indeed, this story is as light and delicate as a feather floating in the breeze. Blink and you might miss it, but if you are lucky enough to see it, it will surely strike a chord in you that you never knew existed.

Such a swirling sensation of emotions would not be possible were it not for the the impeccable chemistry from Chalamet and Hammer. Although the characters in the film (as well as the actors themselves) have drastic age differences — a facet of the film that feels unique on its own — they feel oddly in sync with one another; it is almost as if we are intruding on these characters’ private lives. Hammer, giving an assured and effortless performance, casts a dizzying spell over Elio that is hard to break out of. He is not only charming and attractive, but intelligent and deeply empathetic. This is matched perfectly to Chalamet’s astonishing turn as a teenager who seems to have never experienced a lust or a love so engrossing that nothing else seems to matter. Simultaneously, though, he comes across as wise beyond his years. But as the film gradually reaches its conclusion, we come to learn that even the most brilliant of minds will fall prey to the enigmatic nature of love.

Much has already been written about Call Me by Your Name. It has been picked apart by critics and Twitter users alike — it feels practically futile to be adding my two cents on a film whose discourse began so long ago. That said, this slow moving, quiet love story hit me in a way that many films this year did not. It put into words and actions these feelings that had remained dormant in me for so long. This brief snapshot into Elio’s — and however briefly, Oliver’s — life captured a moment so eloquently. Through these tiny moments and perhaps even the impracticality of a future they know can never have, Call Me by Your Name is a film steeped in love and steeped in passion. To even classify it as a “gay love story” would be discrediting just how timely and timeless this story is. True, the film basks in its characters’ fluid sexualities, and even embraces them in a way that feels celebratory of queer love stories. When all is said and done, however, this is simply a story of love, of deep emotion, and of the moments — grand or otherwise — that will inevitably shape who we are and who we will become.

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• DVD & Streaming

Call Me by Your Name

• Drama , Romance

Content Caution

In Theaters

• November 24, 2017
• Armie Hammer as Oliver; Timothée Chalamet as Elio; Michael Stuhlbarg as Mr. Perlman; Amira Casar as Annella; Esther Garrel as Marzia

Home Release Date

• March 13, 2018
• Luca Guadagnino

Distributor

• Sony Pictures Classics

Movie Review

“My room is your room.”

So 17-year-old Elio tells his father’s summer research assistant, Oliver, who’s 24, when the latter arrives at the family’s sprawling northern Italian home in the early 1980s.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about the arrangement. Each summer, it’s implied, Elio’s archaeologist father, Mr. Perlman, invites a graduate student to stay with the family during a few fleeting weeks of research. And so Elio dutifully surrenders his space to a stranger who joins the family.

Oliver’s lanky good looks combined with his brash American manner quickly draw the attention of several young Italian women. Oliver has an easy, sensuous way about him, one that attracts virtually everyone he encounters.

Including, in a quiet, halting way, Elio himself.

It seems like any friendship at first: bike rides to town for groceries. Conversations about music.

But a lingering glance, a casual touch, a word unspoken all tell a hidden, smoldering story of feelings beneath the surface. Feelings that Elio has (despite a budding romance with a young woman named Marzia, who’s desperately in love with him). And feelings that, it turns out, Oliver has too.

As the minutes tick away in this slow-burning same-sex romance, the audience knows it’s only a matter of time before Elio and Oliver consummate their mutual affection.

Positive Elements

Elio’s parents are both quite attentive to their son’s emotional frame of mind and to his relationships with others. In the abstract, that’s a good thing. The way they express their love, however, is fraught with deep problems, as we’ll see in the balance of this review.

Spiritual Elements

All of the main characters in the film are Jewish. Elio’s family, however, seeks to downplay their ethnicity. (“My mother says we are Jews of discretion,” Elio says.) Oliver, on the other hand, wears his Jewish identity for all to see quite literally: a prominent Star of David pendant. Elio seems taken by Oliver’s open embrace of his ethnic heritage (and it does seem more ethnic than spiritual here, as God and/or faith are never actually mentioned), so much so that he imitates Oliver and begins wearing a similar Star of David necklace himself. Elsewhere, Elio looks up at a cross on a church. Someone says, “Thank God.”

Sexual Content

Elio and Marzia have a couple of scenes in which they kiss and embrace. One involves breast nudity and explicit sexual movements, as well as comments from her about Elio’s anatomy. We also see her in a skimpy bikini, and in a bra. Elio and his father have a frank conversation about whether he’s had sex with Marzia yet.

Elio’s true interest, however, is obviously Oliver. The older man plays volleyball, shirtless. He rubs Elio’s neck and shoulder suggestively. Elio see’s Oliver’s bare rear as he changes clothes. The pair goes swimming together. Elio’s shown shirtless and in boxers, playing piano. When Oliver kisses a young woman, Elio’s clearly jealous. Elio secretly takes Oliver’s clothes and smells them.

Eventually the men get together physically. We see them shirtless as they kiss and embrace, but the movie stops short of showing us anything more (though it’s clear more has happened). Another scene implies oral sex. Still another includes hand-groin contact outside of clothes. There’s more kissing between the two. A piece of fruit is explicitly connected to one sexually oriented scene. Masturbation is implied.

At the end of the summer, Elio and Oliver take a trip together, and the film treats that interlude almost as if they were newlyweds on a honeymoon. They show lots of physical affection. After Oliver returns to America, though, we hear that he’s engaged to a woman.

The film opens with a montage of several ancient, nude male statues. Mr. Perlman, Oliver and Elio are on an archeological recovery project where they find another nude male statue. Men swim in their underwear at a beach. A brief scene involves an older gay male couple who join the family for dinner.

Violent Content

Oliver falls and cuts his torso.

Crude or Profane Language

Three or four f-words (one is indistinct, one is spelled out in subtitles that we see occasionally). God’s name is misused three times. We hear one use each of “d–mit,” “a–hole” and “p—y” (with the latter as a synonym for coward ).

Drug and Alcohol Content

Characters drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes throughout, including teen characters. Two men who’ve been drinking quite a lot and seem drunk get in a car to drive home.

Other Negative Elements

Elio’s parents not only know about their teen’s torrid relationship with Oliver, they approve and even encourage it. Specifically, they enthusiastically support Elio’s long weekend travelling with Oliver before the latter goes back to America.

Call Me by Your Name , based on the book of the same name by André Aciman, is earning rave reviews and awards-season chatter from mainstream critics praising its “sumptuous,” “rapturous” and “beautiful” relationship between a 17-year-old boy and a 24-year-old man.

But almost no one is asking the most obvious question engendered by that age differential: Isn’t this statutory rape?

In the United States, it would be—no matter how in love the 17-year-old was with the 24-year-old, no matter that Elio is the one who has to coax Oliver into bed. In Europe, where the age of consent is lower (14 in Italy), it might not technically be a crime. At least that’s how a few commentators have dismissed the suggestion that this lusty affair might be morally problematic. Childhood, they seem to say, is defined not by physical and emotional development, but by bureaucracy—laws that change simply by crossing a border.

But in a time when our culture is re-examining sexual relationships where a more powerful man has taken advantage of someone without the same power, it saddens me that this story of adult-child sex is not only getting a pass , but getting praise .

The movie itself utterly dismisses any moral concerns. In a moving speech near the film’s end, Elio’s father tells his son:

“Look, you had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. … We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 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!”

Call Me by Your Name invites us to believe that Mr. Perlman’s words here are wise and tender, understanding and compassionate. Later he adds that Elio’s heart and body are his to do with what he will. The only thing that matters is whether Elio is happy or not. In the name of “love,” what this father suggests is that any impulse his son might have is good , that any feeling and any experience is good . What a bunch of pseudo-philosophical gobbledygook!

Perhaps more than any film I’ve ever seen, Call Me by Your Name celebrates the lie of a culture that’s determined to crown every individual the king or queen of his or her life. There is no morality. There is no judgment. There is no truth. There is only the moment and the feelings in that moment. There is only the individual. That is all that matters. And when it comes to sexuality, any consensual expression of it—Elio engages in sex with a girl his age and an adult man—is, according to his parents, a “beautiful” thing.

To suggest that our sexual impulses should be guided by something other than our immediate emotions—or to believe that some forms of sexual expression, such as homosexuality or premarital sex are not what God intended—is anathema to mainstream culture today. In contrast, secular society wants us to believe that such radical individual sovereignty is the ultimate prescription for happiness.

But at the end of this movie, Elio is not happy. He sits weeping upon hearing that his lover is engaged to a woman, the lover who once told him, “I don’t want you to regret anything. I hate the thought that I messed you up.”

Seems a bit late for that sentiment, I think.

For more Focus on the Family resources related to the issue of homosexuality, check out “ When a Loved One Says ‘I’m Gay’ ” and “ Understanding Homosexuality. “

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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“Call Me By Your Name” Review

Lust meets Italy in this captivating movie adaptation.

The 2017 Best Picture award-winning film “Call Me By Your Name” has taken the world by storm, dubbed the “most beautifully composed movie ever seen” and receiving a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Based on Andre Aciman’s novel, this R-rated film has earned its praise, and rightfully so, making it a must-see for those looking to experience the genuine depths and rollercoasters of love.

This film highlights the desire for someone you can’t have, someone older and wiser, unworthy of your naive affection.

Elio, the main character, is 17 and hosts a guest in his Italian villa for the summer. This guest is a graduate student of Elio’s father, Oliver, a wise and inquisitive 24-year-old Jewish-American. Upon this summer spent together, they find intoxicating passion between one another and interest grows between the two, unaware of how their relationship lies ahead.

Despite the stigma gathered around this film, I appreciate the efforts of representing young LGBTQ+ love and the hardships of expressing it in the early 80’s. The storyline is amazing and if you love slow burns, this is your cup of tea.

The complexity of Elio’s emotions portrayed in the movie is extravagantly relatable, and hard to find in other films. It’s an incredible film for those who need a good cry as well as teens who struggle to convey their feelings toward love. It creates a distinct, otherworldly sense in your heart making it easy to empathize with, having you long to watch it for the first time again.

This film was the only thing that helped me understand my feelings about love; it put them in context for me, and it felt like the director turned my raw emotions into a film–into words, into a masterpiece.

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