eschetic-2 Review of Call Me by Your Name

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

A remarkable revelatory "coming of age" story - not for the overly shallow

[9/10 · 5 February 2018]

While I can almost guarantee that CALL ME BY YOUR NAME will *not* win this year's Oscar as Best Picture (despite the well earned nomination), by my lights it is head and shoulders the most deserving of this year's nominees. Proceeding at a stately pace to best appreciate the subtlety of the story and beauty of the settings, this is not a film for the overly shallow or those unable to appreciate adult films in the Merchant/Ivory tradition, but for those emotionally prepared to meet it on its own terms there will not be a more satisfying revelatory exploration of a male coming of age and first love this year. The films greatest achievement may be that while, as many "first love" stories, it can be painful, it is grown up enough that (unlike a film that attempted to treat this territory a decade or to ago and forced to pander to the bigot audience that didn't realize its own bigotry) no one has to die. The "object of desire" is a wise, highly moral graduate assistant who (contrary to the few IMDb reviewers sniffling that the film ignores the potential ethical or moral problems of the seven year age difference of the protagonists) spends a considerable part of the film avoiding the deeper relationship his academic sponsor's eldest - and almost adult - child so obviously desires in large part for that very reason. This implied danger actually gives the film an impressive edge of tension. Setting the film in Europe is probably the film's (and book's) master stroke, freeing the parties from the stultifying 50's repression of too much of what is remembered by those of us who lived through it in the U.S. - the surface cultural homogenization that the current Administration in Washington imagines as a "happy time" to be returned to and which explains the melancholy coda to the film when the older student does have to return to it. Yes, the father's knowing, loving discussion with his son late in the film (which perfectly captures the relationships the luckiest among us HAD with our parents) is a high point that should be required viewing for every American or anyone who expects to be a parent - but the set up for that discussion is what makes CALL ME BY YOUR NAME a masterpiece of American cinema.