Tag: Call Me by Your Name

Call Me by Your Name ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Call Me by Your Name ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Lanky, dark-haired Elio is not your usual seventeen-year-old boy. He reads books, plays the piano beautifully, transcribes music and swims in the river. Elio’s father is a professor, an American, and his mother is Italian. They are a bookish, sophisticated, enlightened family. At their beautiful Northern Italian home, they host a visiting academic during the summer. In the summer of 1983, that person is a twenty-four-year-old American man named Oliver.

Oliver is handsome and seems completely comfortable with himself, arrogant in a way. Everybody likes him because he’s affable and appealing. Elio is determined to not like Oliver at first, trying to appear disinterested, but the two of them begin spending a lot of time bicycling around the beautiful Italian countryside and Elio is increasingly drawn to Oliver in a way that is, it seems, new to him. If you are averse to a story about a same-sex relationship, this is probably where you’d better tune out.

At first Oliver doesn’t want to get involved with Elio because Elio is so young, but his resolve is soon weakened when Elio, not bothered by shyness, makes it obvious exactly what he is interested in. If anybody does any seducing, it’s Elio who seduces Oliver. Elio’s parents soon guess what is going on between Elio and Oliver and don’t mind very much. As Oliver tells Elio, “You are so lucky. My father would have carted me off to the nearest correctional facility.” If they were in the United States, in states where the age of legal sexual consent is eighteen, I’m afraid Oliver might spend the next thirty years in prison.

Call Me by Your Name is based on a novel by André Aciman. It’s a coming-of-age story where the young male protagonist has his heart broken. It’s usually a woman or girl who brings about the breaking heart, but in this case it’s another man. The movie version of the book, which I read earlier this year, is sophisticated, intelligent, thoughtful and beautifully made, flowing seamlessly from beginning to end. Whether or not you can accept and enjoy the story of a love affair between a seventeen-year-old boy and a twenty-four-year-old man is up to you. It might help you to know that the sex scenes are not graphic by today’s standards. My eighty-seven-year-old mother, however, would swear she’s watching porn.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Call Me by Your Name ~ A Capsule Book Review

Call Me by Your Name ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Call Me by Your Name, a novel by a writer named Andre Aciman, is set on the Italian Riviera during a summer in the mid-1980s. Elio is seventeen, very astute and with more depth than most people have at three times his age. He plays the piano, knows several languages, and his work for the summer is transcribing Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ. When was the last time you knew a seventeen-year-old boy who could boast of such splendid accomplishments?

Elio’s father is an American college professor and his mother Italian. They are what are called “ex-pats.” They live on the beautiful Italian Riviera near the spot where Percy Shelley drowned in 1822 at the age of twenty-nine. Every summer Elio’s family hosts an academic to stay with them for about six weeks or so. During the summer in which the story takes place, a twenty-four-year-old man named Oliver is chosen from among other applicants. Despite his young age, Oliver is also an academic and is busy working on a book on an esoteric, scholarly subject. That doesn’t mean, however, that during his summer with Elio’s family he doesn’t have plenty of time for nightlife, tennis, swimming and lying around naked, or practically naked, in the sun. Oh, and he’s also very good looking with a fabulous body. And, when it comes to sex, he is absolutely freewheeling, not bound up in rigidity and Puritanism the way most American men are.

So, the story of this summer in the mid-1980s is being told to us in the first-person voice of Elio, about thirty years or so after it occurred. In a way, it is a coming-of-age story, but with a twist. Most adolescent boys living on the Italian Riviera with their well-to-do and sophisticated parents are going to become infatuated and obsessed with a dark-eyed Italian woman with large breasts. In Elio’s case, however, the object of his lust and affection is Oliver, the young American man who came for the summer and changed Elio’s emotional landscape and the way he would forever view the world.

The words “homosexual” or “gay” are never used in Call Me by Your Name, but that’s what we’re talking about here. There is absolutely a blasé attitude toward sex and gender identity that is very European and that most Americans would find offensive. Americans separate “gay” and “straight” like they separate cars and motorcycles. The European attitude toward sex is that it is more of a continuum. If today you are with a woman and tomorrow a man, who cares? It’s just different branches of the same tree.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997