The pleasure of this lovely film (streaming on
STARZ), in which a peach takes a star turn, lies in the viewer’s willing absorption into a bucolic summer affair that unfolds tentatively, awkwardly, as one remembers first love. The ‘plot’ is the arc of falling in love, aided by one’s own bittersweet recollections of what the hormone avalanche is like — the craving, the hurt, the giddy madness. The film’s title refers to the pair merging with each other, seeing themselves in each other’s eyes — they will call each other by their own names.
Made by a collaboration of notables (at right,
James Ivory of the famed Merchant-Ivory team), novelist
André Acimen (below, left), and director,
Luca Guadagnino (further below, right), the project came together after years of stops and starts, on a low (3.5 million) budget, and was shot in and near picturesque Crema in Northern Italy, the director’s home town, set in the early 80’s when everyone was still smoking and had not disappeared into their cell phones. The source material belongs to novelist Acimen (professor in the graduate school at City
University of New York), who is reportedly writing a sequel. Ivory, the script writer, won an Academy Award last year for best adapted screenplay (the film and lead actor received many nominations and accolades). Director Guadagnino calls this the third film in his trilogy about desire, the prior two being
I Am Love and
A Bigger Splash (both with Tilda Swinton). This third is particularly universal and beloved because of the mind-meld the director achieves between his material and the audience.
Guadagnino describes this work as a search for the blending of the personality of the actor with the character, and believability of the characters’ finding themselves in each other. Some disagreement developed about the filming of sex and nudity. Ivory’s script was more explicit than Guadagnino’s final cut, but the director was deliberate in taking a minimalist approach, explaining that he’d been there/done that in earlier films.
A Bigger Splash was a virtual riot of provocation, nudity, sex. In this story, however, the experiential unfolding of the lovers emotions and their parting grief at summer’s end is intoxicating; explicit sex would call attention to itself rather than the exploration of their feelings. And does he ever succeed — the universality of the emotions possesses one completely as though you are experiencing them yourself.
The story unfolds through the eyes of a beautiful, coltish, 17-year-old, played by the winsome
Timothée Chalamet (above, left) whose star just keeps glittering. Elio is bookish, his spare moments devoted to reading, writing, and music. His American father (
Michael Stuhlbarg, below, second from left) is a professor of Greco-Roman antiquity, and his lovely mother (
Amira Casar) is French. The family chatters back and forth easily in Italian, French, and English with affectionate closeness – an atmosphere both intimate and cosmopolitan — a very inclusive wide wide world.
Elio has a girlfriend from childhood, Marzia, (
Esther Garrel, below, sister to French movie idol
Louis, daughter of famed film director,
Philippe Garrel).
Elio’s father hires a graduate student to join them at their lived-in sprawling villa to assist with his research over the summer. Enter
Armie Hammer as blond god Oliver, handsome and self-contained, like the sculptural ancients that Mr. Perlman studies, cool, self-assured. He is both chilly to Elio’s show of desire — and interested — attracted to Elio’s unself-conscious brightness (says Elio:
If only you knew how little I know about the things that matter). Elio is plain smitten, not knowing how to behave. The two young men circle around each other nonchalantly, Elio becoming irked at Oliver’s casualness and his own obsession. He has sex for the first time with Marzia, acting out his defiance and frustration.
Oliver tells Elio he doesn’t want to mess things up or cause Elio to have regrets. (We’ve been good, he says, we haven’t done anything to be ashamed of — I want to be good.) Elio, so nurtured and accepted by his parents, boyishly, shamelessly prods and pushes Oliver until he drops his guard, gives in to his own feelings, and they pour themselves into each other.
At summer’s tearful end, Elio’s ‘dream dad’ father offers words of comfort and wisdom, in the conversation much noted and treasured by viewers and reviewers (and reminding me of a 6-year-old who once told me she wished that Mister Rogers were her daddy.) Below the image of Stuhlbarg is André Acimen’s text with the gist of the advice to his grieving son.
It appears that dealing with attraction to men has been an issue for Oliver, who would expect his father to humiliate or reject him. Some months after Oliver’s return home, he calls the family to tell them he is engaged to be married. To Elio, though, Oliver says:
I remember everything. Elio confesses that his parents know about them. Oliver replies he had felt like a family member, like a son-in-law. “You are so lucky — my father would have carted me off to a correctional facility.”
In these exchanges are seeds of a new chapter — what happens to the boy who has always had permission from loving parents to be himself versus the one who scrupulously avoids rejection by conforming to expectations.
James Ivory has expressed disinterest in participating in a sequel, while Acimen and Guadagnino look forward to what comes next for Oliver and Elio. Their views suggest different ways to think about the story — one is to imagine the issues that may surface in the lives of two people who have been raised with different expectations. Would Elio find love with a woman or choose a man, having felt entirely free in his choice? Will Oliver be happy in his marriage of expectation, have other partners, or take control of his heart and leave? The other view, and where James Ivory’s beautiful script leaves us, is, at least for now, to contemplate the breathless perfection of a magical love that timed-out naturally because it happened between two people traveling different paths. And that provides our bittersweet ending: Elio smiling through a wash of tears into a crackling winter fire.
The above post was written by our
monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman.
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