A gem for an older person's looking back over life

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2018)

Timothée Chalamet portrays youthful sexual passion powerfully in the Call Me by Your Name. For a heterosexual male to assume that role so seamlessly is, for me, akin to Gwyneth Paltrow's Oscar winning role in Shakespeare in Love. Crossing gender or crossing sexuality is not easy and requires great depth of acting ability. Chalamet's portrayal required a sexual courage most of us presumably don't have.
A young person viewing the film might not recognize the force of the father's last speech since it values the boy's love relationship and subsequent pain from an older person's point of view. That those moments of pain could be a precious part of a first passionate love is perhaps more apparent to those of us who have aged considerably. The setting and pace of a summer's leisure may also appeal most to those in the same economic bracket as the classically educated family described. How many of us can while away summer months in such a lofty cultural manner?
The film's emotional reverberations are deep in the universal valuing of passionate young love, where neither boy nor man reveals to the other what this love might mean. In 1983, Oliver's choice to marry a woman is probably a necessary one from his point of view. Elio, at age seventeen, has no adult thought of a future as a gay male in an inhospitable social climate. He simply desires. Hence his pain is inconsolable as he grieves into the flames of a dining room fire place. Yet his face eventually shows resolve, strength. He will learn in time, we are told.