My Hate and Love for Call Me By Your Name

This year I made it my goal to see almost every best picture nomination as well as any film that seemed to have a chance at the category. I still have to see Darkest Hour and The Post but my point is, I saw a lot of movies this year. This year came with a lot of films that stuck with me emotionally but of all the stories I experienced, none had me as conflicted on how to feel as Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name.

If you are at all into film or have been following the Oscar’s, you’ve probably heard of this movie and about how it is supposedly one of the most beautiful stories of the decade. This is where the purpose behind this essay comes in; I can’t seem to agree with that statement but I also can’t seem to disagree. Call Me By Your Name is the most complicated film I saw this year because it romanticizes the idea of pedophilia yet at the same time captures homosexuality in an intensely intimate manner that felt, to a certain extent, necessary. I’ll start at the beginning.

I was first introduced to Call Me By Your Name when I saw the trailer for the film during a showing of The Disaster Artist. I was intrigued by not only the fact that I was hearing a Sufjan Stevens song in a theatre, but because the film looked incredibly bare and like something I needed to see. A few weeks later after hearing more buzz and praise regarding the film, I stumbled upon the original novel by Andre Acima. It became evident halfway through the book that this was a very erotic story, something I didn’t realize from watching the trailer. It was then that I started putting a few of the puzzle pieces together and my thoughts on the story became more than just “oh, this is beautiful”. The protagonist, Elio, is 17 years old, and his lover, Oliver, is 24. This age difference started to bother me the further into the story I got because in certain scenes it felt as though Oliver was taking advantage of Elio and the fact that he was clearly unsure of his sexuality. This didn’t seem to bother me to an extent that I necessarily hated the book, because it was evident in the writing that Elio was aware of this and Oliver was learning just as much. By the end of the book I felt as though it was a brutally honest and beautiful story which, obviously, lead to me being very excited about the film.

Fast-forward two weeks and I finally get the chance to see the movie. The theatre was full of couples, all there to see what is supposedly the best romance of the year. I’ll cut to the chase and say I enjoyed the film but it was also an incredibly uncomfortable experience.

The film was unlike the book in the sense that there wasn’t as much self-awareness coming from Elio, something that, in my opinion, was crucial to the story. Without that aspect, Elio came across as a privileged 17 year old who found his first love and became obsessed, thinking little about the emotional consequences. It didn’t feel as much like a teenager exploring his sexuality as it did a teenager becoming sexually obsessed with a 24 year old who continued to lead him on. Oliver on the other hand showed some sense of doubt and self-awareness over what he was doing, but it didn’t feel as though he was growing as a person the way Elio was. There was this feeling of guilt and doubt coming out of Oliver throughout the film that said “I know this is wrong but I’m going to do it anyways because we’re in love.”

In the story it felt as though Oliver was taking advantage of Elio for not completely understanding his sexuality yet. I want to believe this wasn’t the case in the story, but based on how it was told in the movie, I couldn’t unsee that. This would have been fine and I would have accepted this if the age difference was addressed at some point. I could have missed something and might just sound like an idiot, but this aspect was never brought up and if it was, it wasn’t addressed nearly enough.

At this point it probably sounds like I hate this film which, in some aspects, I do. But I also loved it for a lot of reasons. For one, from a filmmaking standpoint, Call Me By Your Name is one of the most immersive films I’ve ever seen. I could smell the air of their lawn, I could feel the water in the pool, and I could almost taste the food they were eating.

On top of that, the way the film told the story of a romance was beautiful, subtle, and incredibly honest. It showed aspects of love that typically aren’t shown in film. It did everything but play it safe while at the same time feeling natural. I find this to be particularly important because the film is dealing with a homosexual relationship, a story that isn’t told nearly enough at this scale, let alone this intimate and well-done. What I love the most about it and what I feel it does best is that it doesn’t feel like a “gay” film about two guys who fall in love, it’s just a film about a relationship and love in it’s purest form.

Call Me By Your Name shows the beauty and the love behind same-sex relationships that the general public doesn’t get to see in film as much as they should and pulls off a necessary perspective that is incredibly difficult to portray. It does all of this while at the same time romanticizing a relationship where a 24 year old man takes advantage of a teenager.

I did not expect to come out of writing this essay deciding whether or not I hated the film or loved it, I still have no idea how to feel about the whole thing. It is for that reason that despite my frustrations with the film, it’s a piece of art I can appreciate. The film is full of complications and issues, things I wish did not exist about it, but isn’t that what every authentic relationship has? I can’t speak for much as a 20 year old having experienced only one serious relationship in my life, but I can in full confidence say that the movie imitates the love within the story in a sense that it is complicated, problematic, and beautiful, making it a film I’m going to remember for a long time.

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