CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

Set in northern Italy in 1983, we follow Elio, the teenage son of an academic family, and Oliver, the American graduate student who arrives to work with Elio’s father. The house is full of books, music, languages, ancient sculpture, old money, good manners, and people who know exactly how to speak about art while saying very little about anything of import.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME studies a very particular social world, one where intelligence, taste, and liberal tolerance create the appearance of freedom, while desire still has to move through codes, glances, interruptions, and plausable deniability.

The archaeological material matters. Statues are pulled from water, fragments are examined, bodies are treated as history, and we start to feel like Elio’s own life is something being uncovered. The film’s sensuality comes less from romance than from surfaces: stone, skin, paper, fruit, piano keys, wet hair, sun on tiled floors. Everything looks available and yet almost nothing is simple.

Timothée Chalamet gives Elio an intelligence that doesn’t protect him from humiliation. Armie Hammer’s Oliver has charm, confidence, and the practised ease of a handsome someone who is used to being welcomed wherever he goes. Michael Stuhlbarg’s final scene has become famous for good reason. It offers the kind of parental clarity most coming-of-age films are too nervous to imagine.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is one of the defining queer films of the 2010s. It’s also more complicated than it's reputation suggests. It’s a romance, yes, but also a film about class, education, beauty, permission, and the strange pain of living through something you feel completely, deep in your bones, long before your mind has the language to understand it.