CALL ME BY YOUR NAME: Lee Liberman's Sunday Corner takes a second look at the Guadagnino/Acimen/Ivory collaboration

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.

This year's MOTHER! AWARD goes to Luca Guadagnino's re-imagining of SUSPIRIA

After this past Tuesday's South Florida critics' screening of SUSPIRIA -- the remake/re-imagining by Luca Guadagnino of the 1977 Dario Argento movie of the same name -- several of us were chatting about the film, and mentioned how it reminded us in some ways of last year's uber-divisive movie, Mother! This current Suspiria, we agreed, is as likely to be nearly as divisive, with the negative feedback perhaps stronger than the positive.

There are a lot of reasons for this, starting with the remake's enormous and uncalled for length. The original ran 97 minutes, this one lasts 152.

Both films' plots send a young and talented dancer to a famous European dance academy that doubles as a witches' coven. But Signore Guadagnino, pictured at left, has used all that extra time to gussy-up his movie with a bunch of themes and ideas that go nowhere and never add up to more than mere poorly-thought-out excess.

The director, along with screenwriter David Kajganich (based on the original by Argento and Daria Nicolodi), tosses in everything from family dysfunction, Baader-Meinhof terrorism, psychotherapy, guilt and shame to World War II and The Holocaust, some sort of coming apocalypse, a modern dance recital, satanic rites, and enough guts and gore to fill a dozen so-so slasher movies.

Worse, none of this ever really coalesces. It just piles up rather conspicuously, as the two-and-one-half-plus hours wear on. "What the fuck was he thinking?" may frequently occur to you along the way, about the fellow who earlier gave us much better movies, including I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name.

Guadagnino does possess a visual eye, at least, so there are compensations to be had now and then. And he has rounded up another first-rate cast -- even if he uses them rather poorly. Almost no characterization can found anywhere here. Even the usually fabulous Tilda Swinton (above) can barely bring to life Madame Blanc, the school's choreographer. Swinton fares much better playing the role of Dr. Josef  Klemperer (below), credited to Lutz Eberdorf but now known to be Swinton in some excellent make-up.

Although the leading role and main draw would seem to be Dakota Johnson (below), who plays the "star" student, Susie Bannion, you may find yourself, as did TrustMovies,

more interested in Mia Goth (below), who plays Susie's friend, a plucky but unlucky young dancer named Sara. Ms Goth works wonders with very little, while Ms Johnson proves pretty drab and one-note throughout.

In the film's opening, Chloë Grace Moretz (below) gets a nice scene as one of the academy's more frightened students, but then disappears from the proceedings until returning a good deal later as pretty much a corpse.

Yes, there's a bunch of meaningless scribbles and symbols, and eventually that maybe longed-for ritual so the blood can spurt and splatter.

The weirdest and most effective scene (for those who appreciate extremes) is probably the one early on in which a dancer (Elena Fokina, below) alone in another room is somehow pummeled, jerked, beaten and scrunched to death via Ms Johnson's oddball dancing. Go figure.

Some of us older viewers might take pleasure in seeing a few of Europe's noted actresses -- Germany's Angela Winkler (below, left),  France's Sylvie Testud and Holland's Renée Soutendijk (below, right) -- playing supporting witches. Winker gets the most screen time, while Testud and Soutendijk are utterly wasted.

Fans of the original film's star, Jessica Harper, can see her do a small cameo as the good doctor's dead wife. Otherwise, wait for all the climactic blood-letting and see what you think. I could only roll my eyes and mutter, "Oh, please" and then "So what?" All this is not just grueling but noticeably ugly, just as is the junky-looking poster for the film, at top.

From Amazon Studios, the new Suspiria opened in our cultural coastal cities last week and hits South Florida this Friday, November 2, at some of the local venues. To find the theater(s) nearest you, try clicking here, and I think some of these may appear....

Luca Guadagnino's lush and luscious love story, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, enchants

As fresh, ripe, succulent and gorgeous as the peach that gets its own memorable scene in the film, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is as good as you've probably heard, a not-to-be-missed movie for anyone who treasures Italy, beauty, and tales of first-love, longing and rapturous consummation. Adapted by James Ivory from the novel by André Aciman and directed by Luca Guadagnino (shown below) with his usual visual flair and an even greater sense, this time 'round, for character building via the slow accretion of specific, exactingly chosen moments, the film casts a spell that never once breaks.

Here are longing, lust and love as you have seldom encountered them onscreen, and one of this unusual film's great strengths lies in the fact that, despite the difference in ages of the protagonists -- one is a graduate student, the other a highly gifted teenager -- so strong, growing and genuine is the attraction and bond between them that no taint of wrong-doing hovers over the relationship. This alone is an amazing accomplishment, thanks to the work of Ivory, Guadagnino and the two terrific star turns by actors Armie Hammer (shown above and two photos below) and Timothée Chalamet (the latter, below, seen to very different but also excellent effect in Lady Bird).

The atmosphere, as seems always the case in a Guadagnino film, is highly rarefied -- wealthy, cultured and entitled -- but here, finally, the leading characters are much easier to care about and their emotions more specifically explored than are those in I Am Love or A Bigger Splash, two of this director's earlier films.

The relationship that grows between Elio Perlman (Chalamet), the son of a famous scholar and comfortably assimilated Jew (played with his usual pitch-perfect poise and uncanny character exploration by Michael Stuhlbarg, below), and Oliver (Hammer), that scholar's research assistant for the summer, is a fraught one indeed.

As happens every summer, Elio must give up his bedroom in order to house the summer's new assistant, but this year's version is clearly a bit different. Big, blond and buffed to perfection, Oliver would seem the goy of one's dreams -- except that he, too, is Jewish, if we can judge from the Star of David he wears around his perfectly formed neck.

The feint-and-parry tactics via which the relationship begins eventually give way to, first, a "truce," as Oliver puts it, below, in a move that is charming, funny and also symbolic of just how much of himself our grad student is willing to commit, and slowly to all-out passion and sexual fulfillment.

Interestingly enough, Guadagnino holds back on anything highly explicit or full-frontal and instead concentrates on the passions and emotions generated in and by the relationship. One friend of mine missed the explicit and felt the director unnecessarily held back. Yet, given the immense beauty of our antagonists' faces and bodies, of which we see plenty (despite the lack of "money" shots), the gorgeous Italian surroundings, of which we also view a great deal, and the accent on longing and attraction, it seems clear that Guadagnino is going for emotional specificity over the sexual.

Despite how very good Mr. Hammer is in his role, the movie belongs to Chalamet, through whose eyes, mind, emotions and body we experience most of what occurs. If this young actor does not get at least an Academy nomination this year, we will know that, yet again, they're asleep at the wheel. Chalamet leads us through surprise, disbelief, attraction, exploration, passion and finally grief -- with every step honestly and fully taken, including that of the betrayal of his would-be girlfriend (Esther Garrel, above, right).

As usual in budding romances, the accent is on the here-and-now rather than where the relationship might be heading. Even so, this seasonal-only affair has such built-in limits that it must clearly be one of those "summer loves." What this means to Elio and to Oliver eventually comes clear, and the movie offers a double dose of knockout endings -- one a quiet conversation between father and son, the other in which the camera simply lingers and lingers as we watch and consider.

Call Me By Your Name should take its place as of the movies' great love stories, even if it is, finally, sadly one-sided.

From Sony Pictures Classics and running two hours and twelve minutes, after opening on the coasts a couple of weeks previous, the film hits South Florida (and elsewhere across the country) this Friday, December 22. Click here and then click on GET TICKETS on the task bar at top in order to find the theater(s) nearest you.