Call Me By Your Name

Italian director Luca Guadagnino's beautifully intriguing 2015 film A Bigger Splash was saturated with sensuality, with the film's characters -- an aging rock star, her handsome new stud, her former record producer and his daughter -- often lounging about an impossibly charming villa on an Italian island, nearly naked, bumping uglies and egos, opening old wounds and creating a few fresh ones. Guadagnino's latest film, Call Me By Your Name, is just as evocative but trades the emotional explosiveness for romantic insight and tenderness. It's the early '80s and an archeology professor (how good is Michael Stuhlbarg?) and his wife (Amira Cassar) and their son (the captivatingly Raphaelite young actor Timothee Chalamet) are joined at their Italian villa by an American graduate student (a smoldering Armie Hammer) for a few weeks to help the good professor with some cataloguing and soak up the local culture. Chalamet's young Elio is charged with introducing Hammer's Oliver to the villa, the town and nearby swimming holes and in short order Elio's nascent homosexuality, heretofore suppressed by his interest in a pretty French girl (Esther Garrel), is enlivened, which excites and frightens him. Screenwriter James Ivory's elegant depiction of those first stirrings is masterful, relying on silences, glances and nuance to show young Elio's awakening, uncertainty, frustration, confusion, ardor and, as we might expect, ultimate heartbreak. But when the characters speak, their words can be as lush as the verdant countryside that surrounds them. Call Me By Your Name is a lovely picture that features a marvelous monologue, from father to son, in the last reel that is more splendid by half than it needs to be. Bravo.