Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

IMDB Rating 8.3

In 1983, the son of an American professor is enamored by the graduate student who comes to study and live with his family in their northern Italian home. Together, they share an unforgettable summer full of music, food, and romance that will forever change them.

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Writers: James Ivory (screenplay by), Andre Aciman (based on the novel by) (as André Aciman)

Stars: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg

IMDB Link Here

Movie Rating ★★★★★  

 A peach of a romance

Wendy Ide

T here is a moment just before a teenage crush bursts its dam and becomes a fully fledged first love. It’s a moment in which time is briefly suspended; it’s that shiver of uncertainty before you dive over the edge of the waterfall into the kind of love you could drown in. It’s this – the exquisite torture of not knowing if feelings are reciprocated followed by the helpless flood of emotions – that is captured so intensely and urgently in this gorgeous work of yearning. Director Luca Guadagnino has a gift for romance.

This adaptation of the novel of the same name by André Aciman, penned by James Ivory, forms the concluding part of Guadagnino’s Desire trilogy, following I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015). Of the two, the new film has far more in common with the lush, luxuriant sensuality of the former than the crackling comedy and riotous misbehaviour of the latter.

Both Call Me By Your Name and I Am Love explore the dance between two people who are uncontrollably attracted to each other.

Having evocatively used excerpts of John Adams’s The Chairman Dances in I Am Love, Guadagnino once again marries music to the movie with an instinctive eloquence. In an acknowledgment of the teenage central character – Elio is a gifted multi-instrumentalist – piano features heavily. There’s a hopeful rippling motif, which swirls and eddies like Elio’s adolescent hormones. The film’s setting, in 1983, also makes its presence known, in the form of a few endearingly cheesy period pop songs. Most potent are the wistful original compositions by Sufjan Stevens, played on heartstrings and angst, which give the emotional trajectory of the story a stinging rawness.

But for all the confidence of the film-making, the thing that really elevates this picture to one of the very best of the year is the exceptional quality of the performances. On a second viewing, I become fascinated by Amira Casar, playing Elio’s mother, Anella. Her clear, calm gaze locks on to her husband and her son as she translates a German fable to them, asking unspoken questions of both. “Is it better to speak or to die?”

Stuhlbarg, meanwhile, carries a remarkable scene, perhaps the most important in the film. It’s a speech in which he effectively rips open his chest and bares his heart to his son. Hammer, while technically a little mature for the role, captures the gilded alpha male certainty that makes Oliver so attractive; the casually decisive way that he moves through the world unsettles Elio. And Chalamet, with his restless, impatient physicality and a face as sensual and sculpted as a fallen angel from a Caravaggio painting, is quite simply astonishing. The final scene of the film – the camera rests on Elio’s face in the foreground as he processes his heartbreak – is first love encapsulated in one, sumptuously sad, single shot.

 Read full review at The Guardian

Movie Rating ★★★★★

A period romance as warm and therapeutic as sunlight

Robbie Collin

Elio, Oliver, Oliver, Elio. These two young men are so in tune, even their names laid side by side turn into music. Oliver (Armie Hammer) is an academic in his mid-20s on an Italian field trip. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is the 17-year-old son of his mentor and host. When Oliver finds him, he’s poised on the cusp of adulthood like a first-time diver on the board, affecting a confidence he doesn’t quite have yet, curling his toes around the quivering brink.

The story of their summer together is the subject of the exquisite new film from Luca Guadagnino, the director of I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. It’s an incomparably lovely period romance, as warm and therapeutic as the sunlight that suffuses every frame. The period is the early 1980s – unmissably so, thanks to the shorts, the trainers, and the pop music.

But the setting, described as “somewhere in northern Italy”, is hazy enough to set it a step or two back from the real world, as if we’re watching the flicker of fond memories, or a fairy tale lovingly recalled.

The screenwriter, working from a novel by André Aciman, is none other than James Ivory, and the film rings with all the elegance and passion of the 89-year-old Merchant Ivory co-founder’s very finest work. It’s also Guadagnino’s best to date – teasing, ravishing and just a little arch, but with an open-heartedness that makes you ache.

Bright torrents of piano set the scene – John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction, the first of many ideal soundtrack choices that also include two new songs by the American singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens – before Oliver arrives at the Perlman family’s villa in a blaze of boisterous glamour.

I’ve always enjoyed Hammer’s more mannered mainstream roles, from Mirror Mirror to The Man From UNCLE, which tend to spoof his chiselled looks. But his work here is better than anything he’s done since playing the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher’s The Social Network – it’s witty, compassionate, swaggeringly physical, and never less than fully inhabited.

Chalamet also makes an indelible impression, not least because this 21-year-old newcomer seems so miraculously untutored. And Stuhlbarg, who’s a treasure throughout, gets a fatherly monologue towards the film’s end that’s so observantly and tenderly performed, you can barely catch your breath.

It’s one beautiful moment in a film that’s filled with them – gone in a heartbeat, but leaving the kind of ripples that reach across a lifetime.

Read full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating ★★★★★  

Ed Potton

Golly, this is magnificent. An exquisite romance, a nuanced coming-of-age tale and a perfect portrait of an Italian summer, Call Me By Your Name is the third part in the Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s Desire trilogy. It follows two superb films with Tilda Swinton: I Am Love, in which her married woman embarked on an affair, and A Bigger Splash, in which she plays a rock star engaged in sexual skirmishes with friends in a Mediterranean hideaway.

This is the best of the lot, though: a love story, sans Swinton, that is elevated by the emotional charge of youth.

His volatile sexuality (it is not just boys) is explored with just the right balance of sensitivity and humour (you will never look at a peach in quite the same way again) and soundtracked gorgeously by the Psychedelic Furs’ 1982 song Love My Way and specially commissioned new ones by the singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens.

The screenplay was adapted by James Ivory of Merchant Ivory fame from the novel by his fellow American André Aciman. That would excuse some romanticisation of Italy, yet there is a vividness to this world of alfresco meals, languorous swims and disintegrating paperbacks, and an awareness of how all that heat and sensuality can be oppressive as well as idyllic.

A mediocre film would use Elio’s parents as a one-note backdrop to his affair: oblivious, disbelieving, disapproving or draconian. Here they are none of those things. Indeed, the most powerful scene is a heart to heart between Elio and his father that culminates in an absolute humdinger of a speech from Stuhlbarg: sad, insightful, loving, hopeful and true. If there were an Oscar for best monologue . . .

 Read full review at The Times

Movie Rating ★★★★★  

A beautifully romantic coming-of-age film

Jamie East

Armie Hammer is Oliver, a ­handsome, preppy and arrogant student who spends a summer as a professor’s assistant in a sun- drenched and picturesque Italian village.

Here, Elio (Timothée Chalamet) – the professor’s son – proves to be more than a worthy distraction and the two become embroiled in a passionate, explicit and touching affair.

As with most summer romances, it’s finite – but that’s all that’s needed to change lives forever.

The two leads are utterly superb, but it’s Chalamet who delivers a damned flawless performance as the virginal and inquisitive Elio – as expressive as he is captivating.

 It’s a stunningly filmed romance which, to be honest, I felt didn’t really flourish until its final act.

If love transcends boundaries, this was a courtship that left me slightly cold. I never once felt the couple were destined, or indeed suited, until they were inevitably torn apart.

That said, the Lake Garda ­scenery, casual Italian conversation and a beautiful, touching closing speech from Michael Stuhlbarg as Elio’s father sealed the deal for me.

The film is stunningly filmed, with thought and purpose going behind every shot

Read full review at The sun