The circles I'm in and my pop culture leanings drove this movie up the leaderboard of not just my list of to-watch films but in my list of most-badly-needed-to-watch masterpieces according to many sources. The wild word of mouth about this movie made me very restrictive. I refused to watch the DVD Screener Copy. They said not to watch it when I had a lot going on inside my mind. And to an almost ridiculous extent, I've been told not to start watching it if I reckon that I'm not ready. But with Call Me By Your Name, I think no one is ever ready. No one is ready for the amount of magic and mystery this film has been bringing to its viewers.
It's not just a movie.
It's an experience. An unforgettably beautiful one.
It's an experience. An unforgettably beautiful one.
I felt the disadvantage of having expectations that were through the roof for a film like this. Call Me By Your Name is a 2-hour movie. I spent watching the first hour wanting to see things move. I wished things to rush. I wanted to see action in the plot right away. I wanted emotional confrontations. I immediately wanted twists that I expected to blow my mind. But none of those happens in its first half. That fact honestly made me question all the hype that accompanied the movie. I wondered why for a film so critically acclaimed, Call Me By Your Name seemed dragging to me during its first half. I got the answer to this later on.
The feeling that the movie seems tedious for the first hour is brought about by the fact that nothing pivotal occurs onscreen. We see early 1983 Northern Italian rural lifestyle filled with laid-back moments of bathing in the sun at every possible time in daylight, music sheets getting written or crumpled, nostalgic bicycles passing through old streets, afternoon volleyball games, piano pieces randomly played, dated books with folded pages as bookmarks, soft-boiled eggs and apricots, improvised swimming pools, discussions on Greek antiquity and other art periods, evocative 80's pop music and hints of sexual tensions in subtle moments, among so many other details this film exquisitely infuses as it transitions from one frame to another. I realized that I wasn't really supposed to look for triggering events in the first hour of this movie because the first 60 minutes is spent on transporting the viewers to this era. I would say I somehow got bored by the first hour because I focused on the plot, waiting for things to get complicated. But Call Me By Your Name's first half isn't about what happens. It's about where the characters are, how they live, what they do and how the days go by. It made me feel as though I were in Lombardy in 1983, living, eating, partying, reading and interacting with them.
Not a lot of movies draw you in the very exact settings without much going on in the plot. This film is one of the few.
Now here comes the other half of the movie. This part ignites the tension among characters. It finally reveals so much about what has been left unsaid in the first 60 minutes. The other half then unfolds like a book that slowly grows on you and makes you afraid about it coming to an end. This is where Call Me By Your Name offers a platter full of varying emotions to the viewers. The film delights. It pains. It provokes. It provides promises. It gives hope. Then it betrays or settles, depending on which emotion you'd like to hold on to. And you would wish you could watch it all over again. Experience it all over again. Hoping maybe you'd realize things that didn't hit your mind in your first viewing. Its mystery lies in the fact that the movie gives you so much to feel or think about but after it ends, it keeps you even wanting for more.
Rare is a film like Call Me By Your Name where everything seems to fall into place. If given the chance to change something in the film, it would take some time for me to choose a particular one because I feel like every detail is perfect. You have a pair of breakout leads in Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet whose chemistry onscreen is probably beyond the imagination of those who read the book, anxious to see Oliver and Elio come to life. Timothée, especially. Maybe 80% of all the feels this film gives - Elio, thanks to Timothée, both exhibits and hides it in behalf of all of us.
Timothée is brilliant in such a way that we feel so much from him when he even doesn't say a thing. When he holds back his emotions, audiences stop breathing. There are so many moments in this film that take people's breath away. So many moments of passion, of love, and of sincerity imbued in this film that are all too raw and too powerful to witness. I think of all those scenes in the movie as I write this and I can't decide if I was more affected by those scene that made me flattered or by those that broke my heart.
After watching Call Me By Your Name, I don't tell people anymore that it's just a gay film. This theatrical work of art is more than that. It's a coming-of-age story. It's a story about acceptance. It's a story of a rare kind of love that exists only once or twice to a very few people at very unexpected times. Some people don't even get the chance to experience it. Call Me By Your Name is a reminder that this kind of love exists. It may or may not end the way it should. But that doesn't really matter when it's all about how we lose so much in life because we want to "feel nothing so as not to feel anything." And that we forget that being able to feel may be something. Yet for others, it means everything.
