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.
