A new gay classic

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2017)

"Call Me By Your Name" is a marvelous meditation on first true love on a gay theme. The director, Luca Guadagnino, has created a film that simply refuses to force anything upon the viewer. The film is a masterful study of direction as observation-of letting things be as they are. Timotheé Chalamet is a joy to behold on screen as a coming of age youth in the throws of self-identification and self-legitimization. His late-pubescent struggles with societal constraints and self-inflicted moral dilemmas permeate his nascent feelings for a mid-20s scholar who has come to assist his father at the family's Northern Italy summer retreat. It is an Oscar worthy performance-at once charming, evocative and tender. Armie Hammer's brusque and intelligent performance as the American scholar is also noteworthy. HIs scenes take us by ambush. As hawt as he is to look at, one can't help but be reminded of a rhinoceros charging out of underbrush when his character enters a room. And just like that, a rare new experience unfolds for these tentative lovers who find themselves in an era (the 80s) of overall non-acceptance. One gets the feeling, too, that this experience as it develops will never again be repeated. Interestingly, the AIDS epidemic does not touch this film. In my opinion, a wise decision by the director who transports us to a place of transcendent beauty, as first love ought to be. Love here is remote, fragile, un-worldly, and yet all-knowing, brave, undeniable. It is difficult to create a film so clear and direct in its depiction of life's ambiguities. I didn't want the film to end. A pleasure through and through.