Sunday, October 14, 2018

Call Me by Your Name (RT Features, Frenesy Film Company, Cinéfactures, Sony Pictures “Classics," 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Call Me by Your Name, a Queer-themed movie that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017 and got scheduled for the San Diego Italian Film Festival in Balboa Park after it had already made the rounds of a theatrical release from “Sony Pictures Classics” (a name Charles and I both find oxymoronic because how can a new movie, or a new anything, get instantly acclaimed as a “classic”?) and a DVD release before the Italian Film Festival organizers scheduled it as their bow to inclusion of the “LGBT Community.” (I find that set of initials to describe us even more repulsive when it’s actually spoken out loud in person than when I see it in print; I want to scream out, “I’m a person, not a fucking sandwich!”) For me, Call Me by Your Name turned out to be another Brokeback Mountain, another movie that had been acclaimed by virtually all the opinion-makers, Queer or straight, who wrote about it as the great Queer screen love story and which I found myself not liking despite some admirable qualities. Call Me by Your Name began life as a 1987 novel by André Aciman about a summer romance between Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), 17-year-old son of a character identified only as “Mr. Perlman” (Michael Stuhlberg) and his wife Annella (Amira Casar), and Oliver (Armie Hammer), identified in the official Sony synopsis as 24 but looking about a decade older than that on screen (Hammer was 31 when he made this), a visiting graduate student from the U.S. who’s joining Mr. Perlman on an anthropological study of ancient Greek ruins in northern Italy in general and the homoerotic works of the sculptor Praxiteles (most of whose originals are lost and all we have to judge them by are Roman copies) in particular. The director is Luca Guadagnino, and he and writer James Ivory (the survivor of the Merchant-Ivory production team, notorious for slow-moving, overly literary romances — though their one Gay-themed film, Maurice, was considerably better than this one!) decided to move the time of the story four years earlier, to 1983, so they wouldn’t have to deal with the subject of AIDS and how it not only decimated the Gay male community but added a whole new set of traumas for males dealing with homoerotic feelings to go through on their way to deciding whether or not to come out and definitively identify as Gay. One thing I like about this story is that, like Brokeback Mountain, it takes a non-essentialist, non-biologically determined view of sexual orientation: Oliver has an off-and-on relationship with a woman back home in the U.S. and Elio has affairs going with at least two women, an Italian girl named Mafalda (Vanda Capricio) and a French girl named Marcia (Esther Garral) — though I didn’t realize she was supposed to be French until I heard her say “pourquoi” (“why”) instead of “perché.” 

But the biggest thing I didn’t like about Call Me by Your Name is I really, really, really, really didn’t like the character Armie Hammer was playing. For the first half-hour of this 129-minute movie (about half an hour too long for its own good) I was reading him as a sexual predator, not only cruising the local womenfolk (there’s a scene at a dance in which Oliver zeroes in on Mafalda after Elio stops dancing with her and starts dancing with Marcia instead) but carrying on a calculated seduction of Elio, including putting his hand on Elio’s shoulder, ostensibly to give him an on-the-spot mini-massage during a pickup volleyball game but … well, we know what he really wants. Later Guadagnino and Ivory try to turn the tables on us, having Oliver say he doesn’t want to be “bad” and having Elio grope Oliver instead of the other way around, though this lame attempt to make it seem like Oliver is the seducee instead of the seducer had the opposite effect on me — “See? He’s the kind of sexual predator who’s so good at manipulating people, he makes the other person feel like having sex was their idea.” Hammer is also the sort of actor, like Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt (and Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman before them, though Newman grew out of it when he got to be a better actor and didn’t feel he needed to), who periodically stares at the camera as if it were the magic mirror in Snow White and they were waiting to hear it tell them, “You’re the fairest one of all.” (It also doesn’t help that his lust object is supposed to be 17 but looks about 15; maybe with a more butch actor than Timothée Chalamant as Elio it wouldn’t have looked quite as much like Oliver was robbing the cradle.) Though at least one Gay man tweeted about this movie, “Yeah, sure, I’d have liked my first time to be with Armie Hammer,” I didn’t like him not only because he’s playing a predatory character but because he also seems to be the sort of person who’s so convinced of his own attractiveness all he has to do, in a movie or in real life (though I’m speculating about the latter since I don’t know anything about Armie Hammer’s real life), is walk through the scene and know he’s going to turn heads. (In at least two close-ups he looked so self-righteous and sanctimonious he forcefully reminded us that one of his previous roles was the Lone Ranger.) 

Oliver hangs around Elio, reduces him to a quivering mass of sexually aroused jelly, has his wicked way with him a few times, and moves on back to the U.S. — there’s a tearful parting at a train station that looks like just about every other tearful parting at a train station that’s ever been filmed — whereupon he calls six months later (we know it’s six months later not only because we’re told that but because the lake where Elio and Oliver skinny-dipped during their idyll — this movie contains so many shots of the characters in water I wondered if they were going to devolve back into being amphibians — is frozen over and the trees around its shore are covered with snow; we also know that because the characters are celebrating Hanukah — they’re Jewish, remember? — and of course the filmmakers got the arrangement of the candles wrong) and lets Elio and his parents know that he’s married that woman he was seeing off-and-on back in the States. This ending turns it into a sort of Queer version of Madama Butterfly, though at least Aciman and Ivory resisted the temptation to have Elio commit suicide at the end — which may be simply because they wanted to keep him alive for a sequel. (According to an imdb.com “trivia” poster, Aciman’s novel portrays two reunions between Oliver and Elio, one 15 years after the main action and another five years after that, after Elio’s dad has died.) The most charitable reading of Oliver’s actions could be that this scholar of ancient Greek culture is deliberately and consciously reviving the Greek tradition of pederasty — an older man becoming both the intellectual mentor and the physical lover of a younger one, before both the sexual and mentoring relationships end and both parties go back to being straight (scholars of Greek culture are still debating whether the ancient Greeks accepted any sort of homosexuality other than pederasty, and certainly modern Greece is one of the most homophobic countries in the world).  

Call Me by Your Name was an interesting contrast to A Ciambra because it took place in northern Italy (specifically Crema, a beach town just outside Milan) instead of southern Italy (Italians, like Americans, tend to regard their Southerners as déclassé, and Sicilians the worst of all Italians — at least partly because Sicily was the birthplace of the Mafia), and the characters were considerably higher up the class scale. Indeed, one of the things that irritated me about Call Me by Your Name is that all the people in it who spoke English at all spoke it with perfect American accents — maybe we’re supposed to believe Elio learned it from his U.S. expat father, but still the moment Timothée Chalamant opens his mouth his Valley Boy English is so good I can’t believe him as a born-and-bred Italian with an Italian first name. Not only does the fact that both he and Armie Hammer speak not only the same language but the same dialect of it eliminate the culture clash one expects in a story like this, it gets even weirder when, no matter where we’re told the characters are from — Italy, France, Patagonia or wherever — they’re all talking the way you’d expect to hear at an American suburban shopping mall. (This bothered me a lot more than the Frito Bandito accents the cast members of The 33 adopted to convince us they were Latin American even though they were speaking English.) Call Me by Your Name was a disappointing movie, and it’s even more dispiriting to read on its imdb.com page that they’re preparing a sequel — at a time when so many Queer love stories remain to be filmed! As far as I’m concerned, Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education remains far and away the best Queer-themed film of the 21st century, though Call Me by Your Name makes me want to re-watch the 2010 French film Come Undone (Presque Rien), also a summer Gay male love story set in a beach town but with the two lovers closer in age, and which I  recall as having more of a real sense of emotion, and less of a sense of sexual and emotional exploitation, as Call Me by Your Name.