Summer of gay love

Rating: 8/10 (1 November 2017)

After years of famine this is feast year for gay picture-goers: two gay love stories in two months. Scripted by James Ivory and directed by Luca Guadagnino, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME has all the rich texture and subtlety of a 'classic' Merchant-Ivory production. It's 1983 and 17-year-old Elio Perlman (Timothee Chalamet) is spending the summer at his parents' house in Northern Italy. A hunky American graduate (Arnie Hammer) arrives to help his professor father with archaeological research. Elio develops a crush on the charismatic Oliver who, reluctantly at first, reciprocates. A summer of intense passion is bound to have a short lease as Oliver has to go back to the States.
The two leads give deeply felt performances and the spirit of the 1980s – musically and morally – is delicately evoked. Elio's dad (Michael Stuhlbarg, a near double for Robin Williams), supportive and non-judgmental, is the dad any gay teenager would yearn to have.
Cinematography and the music score are superb. At two and a quarter hours the movie is a tad too long and slow to take off, but the intensity of this love story exceeds GOD'S OWN COUNTRY and is very much the equal of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. The mood reminded me very much of Joseph Losey's THE GO-BETWEEN (1971). A movie not to be missed.