A gay romance

Rating: 9/10 (28 January 2018)

I find many romance movies involving young people tend to get very cliché ridden. The characters tend to be very two dimensional and often find themselves in situations we have seen a million times before. These things make for a very laughable soap opera type of film whether it's a gay or hetero pair of lovers.
Timothee Chalamet plays 17 y/o Elio and Armie Hammer is 29 y/o Oliver who fall in love over the summer of '83 in Northern Italy. Much of the usual clichéd plot lines in gay love stories are absent in this movie; there are no typical "bullying" or "I'm confused" subplots to cause distraction. The characters are multi dimensional and the story has some twists. I found the pace somewhat slow though.
The only thing that concerns me with the movie is the age difference between the two characters, despite their maturity Although both actors are adults in real life, the age difference is a little disquieting though there is no suggestion of force, psychological or physical. In the book, Oliver is 24.