Powerful and absorbing.

Rating: 10/10 (21 March 2018)

Truly masterful art work as seen here is very rare in film nowadays. Despite my great excitement as I settled down to watch this, I didn't anticipate how much a film, this film, could affect me, and wasn't prepared for the emotional awakening upon the first and repeat viewings. It may be a cliche to say a film can change your life, yet Call Me By Your Name effortlessly and effectively twinges at your nostalgia through exhibiting a freedom in the perfect idyllic setting to explore yourself as a human being.
It introduces you to the Northern Italian home of Greek professor Sam Perlman and his wife and teenage son, who welcome in a student every summer to assist him. This year the confident American Oliver has come to stay, his arrival opening the film and the door to this tranquil oasis where he blunders in with his natural charm and vigour, completely entrancing the Perlman's 17 year old son Elio. What develops between them over the summer is a pure and unfiltered romance, with time as their only enemy.
It's hard to tell which performance shines brightest here. The whole ensemble of the cast is perfectly orchestrated, with characters presented so vibrantly and free that they fully capture the scene, almost as if you are watching real life unfold before you. Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar are so effortless as the relaxed intellectual parents with a rich and eclectic social circle, though it is in Mr Perlman's final speech to his heartbroken son that truly captures the films sorrowful joy and it's ode to first stomach-wrenching heart-racing knee-quaking love and the bottomless despair when it ends. Yet the real beauty of this film comes in Elio's growing reluctant infatuation for the older man and the passion that blossoms when his attraction is reciprocated. It is impossible to untangle the performances of Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet as Oliver and Elio respectively. Oliver's greatest moments lie in the quiet removal of his barriers as he and Elio grow closer, the freedom he exhibits, both in his experience of the summer and his romance with Elio, and also in his quieter despair when the reality of time catches up to them. Armie captures Oliver's freedom masking a deeper longing, so eloquently and naturally, and you feel his inhibitions lower with Oliver's as he gives himself so openly and honestly to the role. Timothée Chalamet, meanwhile, delivers such a masterful and mature performance that it is hard to believe that Elio is not a real person whose life you are capturing a glimpse of. So very infrequently can an actor capture the inner turmoil going on in his characters thoughts, but Timmy breathes Elio's thoughts and desires; he wears them on his skin so exposed and unfiltered with his emotions, and whilst the end of the film should be celebrated from such a young and up and coming performer, it is in his earlier scenes of his growing intense irritation by and infatuation of Oliver that I enjoyed the most, from his fidgety restlessness, to his lingering gazes, to his embarrassment and insecurity around the more self assured Oliver, to most especially the disappointed, jealous thoughtful glare at Oliver on the dance floor as he realises the depth of his desire for the first time.

The nostalgia the film conjures up within you is life-defining; Call Me By Your Name transports you to a time and a place where life was unfiltered; whether for the characters in the film or the cast and crew who made the film, it captures a moment, a memory; a kiss you will never have again; a touch you will never feel again; an experience that comes and goes with a blink of the eye, but leaves you irreversibly transformed. As a viewer, the film lingers within you, like first loves, past romances and unrequited attractions, bringing you much anguish and hope in equal measure that, like Mr Perlman softly advises, you should embrace and rejoice in rather than kill the pain of the heartbreak. Call Me By Your Name is timeless; it is proof that masterpieces of art don't just appear on canvas or carved it stone; they can be in an actor's gaze, an actor's expressions, the raw relenting submission to a character's mind frame, and to the idyllic experience of the perfect summer with the perfect person.