Call Me by Your Name review: Sensual summer tale of desire and first love

ANYONE who can remember what it was like to fall in love for the first time will recognise the aching accuracy of what this highly-acclaimed film conveys, writes Leigh Paatsch.

Call Me By Your Name (M)

Director: Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash)

Starring: Timothy Chalumet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel.

Rating: 4½ (out of five)

Don’t question, just answer

THE time and place vividly conjured by Call Me By Your Name is an early 1980s summer in northern Italy.

The seductive, carefree atmosphere pouring off the screen will be enough to totally captivate most viewers.

However, once the story of Call Me By Your Name kicks in, the overwhelming beauty of the movie does not seem to matter as much.

What comes to the fore even more powerfully — and lastingly — is a certain state of mind captured in fine detail.

Timothy Chalamet in a scene from Call Me By Your Name.

Anyone who can remember what it was like to fall in love for the first time — that moment where the here and now were all that mattered, and the how and why could wait forever — will recognise the aching accuracy of what the movie conveys.

Elio (Timothy Chalamet) is 17 years of age, the only child of an American father (Michael Stuhlbarg) and French mother (Amira Casar), living an idyllic year-round existence in the Italian countryside.

Theirs is a household as cosmopolitan as it is academic. Visitors come and go as they please. Conversations are spirited, intense, intimate and interesting.

As the summer heats up, Elio’s close friend Marzia (Esther Garrel) wants their relationship to become something more than platonic. Elio can seem either reluctant or willing to go along with the idea, depending on his mood at the time.

Then comes the arrival of a visitor from America for an extended stay.

The sensual film is set in 1980s Italy.

Oliver (Armie Hammer) is a graduate student in his mid-20s, completing a brief internship with Elio’s dad, a professor of archaeology.

The competing airs of enthusiasm, mystery and curiosity Oliver brings to the household is felt by every resident. None more so than Elio, who finds himself drawn to the good-looking guest in ways he cannot fully understand. Or, for that matter, hide.

Based on the acclaimed 2007 novel by Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name builds slowly, but surely into a truly great work of purely emotive cinema.

BREATHE SADLY LACKING BREATH

While Chalumet and Hammer will both look back on their flawless performances here as star-making breakthroughs, it is Stuhlbarg as Elio’s father who seizes the production’s greatest moment.

It is a small scene late in the movie. Stuhlbarg, sitting on a couch, delivers a modest, yet searingly wise monologue about memory, desire and acceptance that lifts Call Me By Your Name to a higher place, and then leaves it there.