Call Me by Your Name
2017 · Luca Guadagnino
The director in the conversation
The horniest working prestige director, in the culture's affectionate phrasing: Challengers and Queer in a single year made him the center of every conversation about desire on screen, and his prolific pace (Bones and All, After the Hunt) is itself a talking point. Also permanently attached to the Call Me by Your Name/Armie Hammer asterisk.
When you need a good cry, or want to remember what first love felt like — a slow, sensual summer film for an unhurried evening, gentle in form but emotionally heavy-hitting.
What it's about
Northern Italy, summer 1983. Seventeen-year-old Elio is idling through the season at his family's villa — reading, swimming, transcribing music — when Oliver, a confident American graduate student, arrives to assist Elio's professor father. Over six weeks of meals, bike rides, and half-spoken conversations, attraction builds between them into a first love neither expected.
The experience
Languid, sun-drunk, and quietly overwhelming — it moves at the pace of a long vacation afternoon and then breaks your heart with almost nothing but a look. Expect to leave it tender.
Performances
Timothée Chalamet is astonishing — all coltish deflection until the mask slips — in the role that made him a star, and Michael Stuhlbarg's late monologue as Elio's father is one of the most quoted scenes of modern movie fatherhood.
The craft
Luca Guadagnino directs with a sensualist's patience, and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's 35mm photography turns peaches, bicycles, and poolside light into a catalogue of longing. James Ivory's screenplay, adapted from André Aciman's novel, won him an Oscar at 89 — the oldest competitive winner in the Academy's history. Sufjan Stevens's songs do a lot of the emotional lifting.
Why it matters
A defining art-house hit of the 2010s that launched Chalamet's career, capped Guadagnino's trilogy of desire, and reset expectations for how tender and unhurried a mainstream queer romance could be.
Reception & legacy: how Call Me by Your Name was received, argued over, and remembered →
A seventeen-year-old and his father's visiting graduate student circle each other through one languid Lombardy summer in 1983 — reading, swimming, transcribing music, saying everything except the thing itself. Luca Guadagnino, capping what he called his Desire trilogy after I Am Love and A Bigger Splash, adapts André Aciman's novel with a sensualist's patience: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's single-lens 35mm photography turns peaches, bicycles, and dripping swim trunks into a catalogue of longing. The screenplay came from James Ivory, whose Maurice had mapped this territory three decades earlier; at 89 he became the oldest competitive Oscar winner in history. Timothée Chalamet's performance — all coltish deflection until the mask slips — made him a star, and Michael Stuhlbarg's late monologue as the father has entered the canon of great screen speeches about love and grief. The film sits in a lineage of European art cinema (Guadagnino openly invokes Rohmer and Bertolucci) while feeling wholly contemporary in its tenderness. It ends, famously, on a held close-up by a fireplace, Sufjan Stevens on the soundtrack — several unbroken minutes of a face learning what feeling costs.
Lines of influence
- Death in Venice (1971) — Guadagnino inherits Visconti's slow, aestheticized desiring gaze upon youthful beauty — longing rendered as restraint and drenched in classical music rather than dialogue.
- Stealing Beauty (1996) — The template of a sun-soaked Italian villa summer where an outsider's sexual awakening unfolds among cultured expats, staged as a languid golden-hour idyll of skin and idleness.
- The Dreamers (2003) — Bertolucci's unguarded, tactile filming of young bodies and their casual erotic physicality — the sensual intimacy Guadagnino cites as direct influence.
- A Summer's Tale (1996) — Rohmer's real-time, talk-driven seaside coming-of-age rhythm — natural light, deferred desire, and moral hesitation dramatized through unhurried conversation rather than plot.
- Maurice (1987) — Ivory (CMBYN's screenwriter) had already built the gay period romance of literary adaptation and unspoken repression — the direct authorial DNA of the script.
- A Room with a View (1985) — Merchant-Ivory's Italian landscape as sensual liberator against Northern restraint, and the E.M. Forster-style adaptation of desire suppressed then loosed by place.
- Wild Reeds (1994) — Naturalistic adolescent queer awakening set in a hot provincial summer, treating teenage bodies and confusion with tender, non-judgmental sensuality.
- The 400 Blows (1959) — The held final shot of a young protagonist's face — Truffaut's freeze-frame ache — is the formal ancestor of CMBYN's sustained closing close-up of Elio by the fire.
- Tropical Malady (2004) — Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's signature here — languid natural light and humid, sensuous landscape texture — is the same eye he brought to CMBYN's single-lens 35mm look.
- Brokeback Mountain (2005) — Queer love expressed as longing and restraint across a landscape, carried by withheld touch and glances more than declaration.
- I Am Love (2009) — Guadagnino's own Desire-trilogy method: fetishistic close-ups of food, fabric and sensual objects as displaced eroticism within an Italian bourgeois household.
- A Bigger Splash (2015) — The immediately preceding Desire film — Mediterranean sun, exposed bodies and charged domestic idleness rendered through tactile surfaces.
- Weekend (2011) — Naturalistic, near-real-time queer intimacy built from small gestures and restraint, letting tenderness accrue through everyday closeness rather than melodrama.
- God's Own Country (2017) — Rural queer romance where craft lives in tactile, physical labor and touch — reticence broken by hands, mud and skin rather than dialogue.
- Moonlight (2016) — Queer coming-of-age told through held, luminous close-ups of faces and a plaintive, string-forward score that carries emotion the characters cannot speak.
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) — Longing and restraint sustained through the held gaze, in period costume, resolving in a lingering final shot of a face overwhelmed by feeling — the CMBYN ending inverted for a woman.
- Aftersun (2022) — A languid holiday steeped in memory and elliptical restraint, mining unbearable longing from an idyllic vacation seen in retrospect, with emotion held just off-screen.