A dreamy masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (16 September 2019)

Call Me by Your Name had me hypnotized early on, kept me curious throughout, and it ultimately reveals itself as one of the great coming-of-age love stories. This here is a film told with masterful restraint, with enormous respect for cinematic language and vision, shot in lush 35mm and it transported me to a time and place so specifically that I had to jar my head and reconnect with my surroundings when it was over. It is a great treat for the senses.
The story is simple. It is the summer of 1983 and we meet a teenager, Elio (Timothee Chalamet) who lives with his family in a small village in northern Italy. His father (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a professor of history and archaeology, and invites a different graduate student to live with them each summer. This particular summer the student is a charming, strutting American, Oliver (Armie Hammer). What begins as a tense sharing-of-space between the Elio and Oliver, morphs into something else, at first unmentionable, dancing around the obvious subject. And then something deeper, until we are lost in it along with them.
Yes, this film contains homosexual subject matter, but like Brokeback Mountain, another great film about love and loss, it transcends that narrow viewpoint and tells a story simply about two people sharing a moment in time. We aren't met with cliches about this sort of relationship, there are no moments of intolerance, of 'talking through it', of shame around having those feelings. There are challenging aspects to the subject, around the age difference of Elio and Oliver, which also go unmentioned. No, this film is not meant to contain a political or social message. It is about a young person's first love experience, and all the complexities and strangeness around that experience which rings true to life, because life is complicated too.
The cinematography is spectacular. Avoiding typical postcard-like views of Italy, it was shot in intimate 35mm and the result is transportive, with crisp, bright blue skies, deep sun-drenched yellows and colors of lost summer memories and landscapes and views of Crema which jump out at you. Like Lost in Translation, shooting this on film creates an atmosphere of nostalgia and romance which is captured so perfectly by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.
Call Me by Your Name is a beautifully told film which is so obviously a classic that it left me immediately spellbound, and stayed with me for days after.