Love My Way
On Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name
Puberty ushers in an interpersonal revolution. For people in middle-schools all across the globe, the significance of other people is transformed. They pick up a new potentiality—the lover. Our sensitivity to this potentiality might gradually build, but by the time we’re 17 or 18, it violently impinges on our consciousness.
This pushes us towards other people in a new way. Its excitements are well documented, as well as its downfalls. Hovering in between these two is the fact that this revolution makes it much harder to tell where our interest in particular others lies. Is it mere lust or is it love? The former is extinguished once its object is obtained, whereas the latter persists. The problem is that the former is very often disguised as the latter. Many a prom night has led to this revelation.
Call Me By Your Name—both Andre Aciman’s novel and Luca Guadagnino’s film—is an exploration of the madness of this revolution. The main protagonist is Elio, a 17 year-old who is intellectually gifted nearly to the point of satire. His father is a famous archaeology professor, his mother is an Italian aristocrat (perhaps of minor significance). His parents have a tradition of inviting an American PhD student to stay with them in their summer home for 6 weeks each summer, both to act as an assistant to the father and to work on their dissertation.
In the summer of 1983 they host Oliver, a 24 year old philosophy PhD student from New England. Elio is initially annoyed about Oliver’s presence—as he has been by previous versions—since it forces him to vacate his normal room. It is clear that, usually, hosting these students is a chore.
Oliver is very American. He is brash and confident. He parts with people by exclaiming ‘later', which Elio complains about to his parents as a way of signaling to them that he has a crush. Elio is many things at once. Fiercely intelligent, prodigious, but also very immature. He quickly falls for Oliver.
Readers of Acimen’s novel would rightly be skeptical of turning it into a movie. This is because it is more or less Elio’s diary. Much of it is a diary of his lust. Those with a low tolerance for teenage lusty cringe will have a hard time at points. In any case, the novel takes place inside of Elio’s head. Oliver is, for most of it, an alien being.
The medium of film makes it difficult to tell a story in this way. This is especially so if you do not use the protagonist as an official narrator, which Guadagnino does not. It is a hard problem to present the story from one character’s perspective if it is shot third-personally.
Guadagnino takes this problem head on, using the essential elements of the medium in order to do it. These are sights, sounds, and pacing. This is an ambitious strategy that could easily miss the mark. It does not (for the most part).
The film moves slowly. Its world is that of a lazy Northern Italian summer (Oliver: “What do you do in the summer around here.” Elio: “Wait for the summer to end.”). When it is sunny, the air is still, the temperature high. Everything is moored down, slowly drifting towards fall. When it rains, the heat is washed away abruptly; this just moves the waiting populace inside.
This contrasts with the rapid violence of Elio’s insides. His path is well-trodden, from annoyance to fascination to lust to eros. But the sexual side of this is new to him and at times it is overwhelming. It becomes more complicated by the fact that it is unclear if Oliver is interested, both in Elio in particular and men in general. This drives Elio close to madness.
Guadagnino signals perspective just by the way he shoots Elio. Elio is shot face on at head height. You are supposed to look at him thinking, encouraged to see things through his eyes (even though what he is seeing is behind you). This contrasts with how Oliver is shot, usually from the side or behind. Oliver is portrayed the way that Elio sees him: An attractive shell, briefly revealing something more inside from time to time, but almost fully guarded about his wants and needs.
This technique is used to great effect in one of the film’s hinge scenes. Elio and Oliver go to the local disco with Elio’s longtime local friends. Oliver is dancing with a local girl, perhaps to make Elio jealous but perhaps Elio is not on his mind at all. Elio is close to the edge in his infatuation and must decide whether to pursue (more on this scene later).
A second visual technique used to signal perspective is the way that Guadagnino blends the inside and outside. Elio’s family home is an important character in the film (in fact, Guadagnino changed the setting of the move to his own northern region of Lombardy from the novel’s southern setting precisely because he already knew the house). It is almost always open to the world, and its windows and balconies play crucial roles in the plot. Elio is often peering out of windows in contemplation. Like with Oliver, he is trying to figure out the world. And like the Italian summer, he is trying to blend the outside and inside.
The cinematic element that stands out the most are the sounds. The ambient noise is almost always very noticeable. Up until the last scene, these are intense sounds of summer. The bugs, the downpours, the splashing of water in pools, ponds, and rivers. These sounds are omnipresent. They greatly heighten the above effects.
The aural component in combination with the visuals lends the impression that the world is waiting for Elio and Oliver. The outside world is static, almost motionless, waiting for the two to fill it with meaning. This itself reflects Elio’s perspective. Rural Lombardy is a second home to Elio; he knows these summers inside and out. They are hot and as boring as his mind will let them be. For Oliver things are obviously much different. He is at a pivotal moment of his academic career, coming to a beautiful place for the first time. The external environs are tremendously exciting for him. The film gives you glimpses of this, but true to form, you only see them here and there.
One important exception to this general environmental ennui comes in another crucial scene. Colleagues of Elio’s father have found a lost Roman sculpture in Lake Garda. He asks Elio and Oliver to come with him to have a look. What they find is utterly breathtaking. All three are transfixed, with Elio’s father taking the exuberant lead. Elio cannot help but be brought up, partly because he is on an an outing with Oliver, but mostly because of the beauty, piercing through the meaningless world, demanding attention.
Those are the sights and sounds of Elio’s world. The film is supplemented by an absolutely brilliant soundtrack. A whole essay could be written about its greatness. It not only places the film in its time and place, it also plugs into the key themes and heightens the film’s meaning.
The obvious place to start is Sufjan Steven’s two songs that were written for the film—‘Mystery of Love’ and ‘Visions of Gideon’. These are two of Sufjan’s best songs and fit the movie perfectly. The contrast between the hum of nature and Sufjan’s dense, lush music brings the film together.
Another song, though, plays a bigger role in the telling of the story. This is The Psychedelic Furs’ 1982 song ‘Love My Way’. It plays in two key scenes of the movie. The first is the discotheque scene mentioned above. It is the song that comes on when Elio decides to keep his passion for Oliver alive. It is a sign of hope mid-movie.
It takes on a different hue later. If it wasn’t already obvious, Elio and Oliver break through the barrier and start a real romantic relationship. This comes nearly at the end of Oliver’s stay. He needs to go to Bergamo (Rome in the book) before going back to America. Elio’s mother suggests that Elio go with him. They spend a few days together, trouncing through the alps and getting drunk. Sufjan’s ‘Mystery of Love’ narrates.
On the final night they drunkenly walk through the streets of Bergamo. They come across some locals listening to ‘Love My Way’. Oliver rushes to them in order to dance. He tellingly leaves Elio behind, pulls the woman aside, and starts dancing with her. Elio watches on sadly, eventually vomiting. Oliver laughs this off as youthful drunkenness, but I think not. This was the bursting of the bubble. This is only accentuated by the way it is shot. For several minutes leading up to this point, the visual perspective shifts away from Elio onto them as a couple (see the YouTube still above). Right before he vomits, the perspective shifts back to Elio. His world had expanded but now it retracts. (Interestingly, the very next scene is one of two where the perspective shifts to Oliver, watching Elio sleep in the Bergamo hotel, wondering—I’d wager—whether to go back to America.)
Guadagnino works hard to use the features of his craft to tell the story. This makes the penultimate scene even more striking. Oliver goes back to America, leaving a heartbroken Elio. He ends up calling his mom to come pick him up at a rural train station. Sometime upon his return, he goes to speak to his father in his father’s office. His father gives a little speech about eros and its aftermath. While there are ambient sounds of an incoming storm and well timed music, there are no windows here. It is also the most literary aspect of the movie, taking the speech verbatim from the novel. Elio’s father presents a passionate plea for passion, offering up a mature vision of parental hope.
The speech itself is beautiful. Its beauty is accentuated by the contrast between how it is presented vis-a-vis the rest of the film. Guadagnino bottles up the literary nature of the material and unleashes it in this scene.
In the final scene, Guadagnino returns to the cinematic. We fast forward to the next Christmas. Elio and his parents have returned to Lombardy. The summer is long gone. The wide open vibrancy of the summer has past, replaced with the soft patter of falling snow. Elio bounces into the house, now closed up, all echoes. He is buoyant but closed off.
Elio’s parents are in the process of reading applications for the next summer’s fellow. Oliver calls unexpectedly. Elio picks up. Oliver is calling to tell them that he is getting married the next spring. They all take it as you’d expect—heartbreak. It’s definitely over with Oliver and there is nothing to do. Sufjan’s ‘Visions of Gideon’ narrates.
We see Elio’s world for the last time, in an echoey house, his face filled with the light of the fire’s flame. The good things come and then they go. Rather than closing us off from them, this should motivate us to embrace them even more. While it might be sad to reflect on their flames once they’re gone, the memories at least bring warmth.