An Emotional Journey to Italy with Call Me by Your Name

By JBFC Marketing Associate Sarah Soliman

There are films that feel more as if you’ve lived them than watched them, when you become immersed by the world on the screen, when it seems as if you’ve experienced what the characters have experienced. Call Me by Your Name is a movie you live.

In the new film from Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash), seventeen year old Elio (Timothée Chalamet, Lady Bird) spends his summers at his family’s home in Northern Italy, where his academic father invites a graduate student to live and work for six weeks. In the summer of 1983, that student is handsome Oliver (Armie Hammer, Nocturnal Animals, Free Fire), for whom Elio finds himself grappling with unexpected feelings. The crush turns into an ardent affair that leaves Elio shattered when summer ends.

Call Me by Your Name moves the way summer does when you’re young: unhurriedly; a deliberate pacing that makes the building attraction between Elio and Oliver unbearably tense, giving the audience our own taste of their longing for each other. Anybody who has ever been a teenager will recognize something in the way Elio’s desire for Oliver confounds, frustrates, and overwhelms him.

Timothée Chalamet brings Elio to life with a performance that is stunning, particularly in its physicality—there is something feline in his movements and in the way he allows other characters to touch him, yet he turns into more of an eager puppy around Oliver. Armie Hammer’s Disney prince good looks have never been put to better use and Michael Stuhlbarg is kindness made manifest as Elio’s father. The warmth of the characters and their affection for each other is as welcoming as the Italian sunshine that casts a dreamy shimmer over the entire film.

As winter truly sets in, there’s not much more you could ask for than a sun-drenched respite in Italy complete with a heartwarming (and heartrending) love affair.

Call Me by Your Name opens Friday, Dec. 22. Tickets are now on sale HERE.