Stylish but lacks substance.

Rating: 5/10 (17 July 2018)

Call Me By Your Name was easily one of the notable releases of 2017. A stylish romance set in beautiful countryside of Italy.
The film captures the beauty very efficiently both from its actors and locations. It has some great music in it. But when it comes to setting up these pieces to make one story, it falls short. To be honest, I felt the chemistry between Elio and Oliver seems artificial. Timothee was trying too hard to make the audience believe in his character and Hammer seems to be not trying at all.
The screenplay and the way the film is directed is totally weird and lame, it almost seems that the characters were doing stuffs just because someone told them to do those. None of the characters seems believable. For instance, the scenes involving Hammer and Chalamet seems to be uncomfortable to the point that you can almost imagine someone dictating them what to do from behind the camera. You can almost feel the artifice in their act. The film was filled with such poor and pretentious acting. The screenplay seems to be all over the place, things happening for no reason at all (just to remind, it got an Oscar for it's screenplay). The plot didn't seem to be moving anywhere until suddenly everyone's having sex with everyone.
Everything was agonizingly boring already when finally the two characters say they like each other, the scene in the WWI monument somehow establishes that. Somehow at that point they started understanding each other so well that they didn't even needed words to express themselves. How did they reach there, who knows.
The film had some great dialogues but the characters were just not written sincerely enough to make us live those dialogues. At the end, these were just great dialogues without any depth being uttered by some actor pretending to be someone else.
The only thing which I liked are the songs. I was waiting for them to come. But finally when these songs gets kicked in, it was already too late to rescue the drowning ship.
This film just don't deserve the hype it got before the awards season.
P.S. - I gave one extra star for the "Mystery of Love".
P.P.S. - Please someone give these two guys something to wear.