Later

Call Me by Your Name

Crit

The record will show that I loved neither Io sono l'amore nor A Bigger Splash, the two previous films in Luca Guadagnino's Desire trilogy. This one, though, got me. This is the sort of story Henry James would be telling us if he were around today. And out.

Oliver (Armey Hammer) is a classic Jamesian American, brash but naïve, encountering mature and hazardous Europe. He is in an unnamed (but not far south of the Alps) Italian locale for the summer as the graduate assistant to Perlman, an archaeologist (Michael Stuhlbarg, whom I saw 24 hours ago play New York Times publisher Abe Rosenthal, and whom I've been happy to see ever since he was Arnold Rothstein on Boardwalk Empire), who has a beautiful son, Elio (Oscar-ready Timothée Chalamet).

In a story of young love and older lover, it's impossible not to look for power relations, but here the boy's youth is balanced to a great extent by the American's callowness--both of them are unready for love, and both need to suffer its delicious agony. And Elio's parents are as far as can be from the hysterical parents in a typical American coming-out story ("My father would have carted me off to a correctional facility," Oliver tells him). In fact, Perlman, in a speech way too long to work, and yet it does, gives his son some pretty astonishingly good post-love-affair-pre-the-rest-of-life advice.

It seems we're finally getting to the point where a cinematic love story can be lovely without your really giving much thought to its being a gay love story.