Call me be your name. A film as beautiful as it is precious and necessary.
 
To fully understand Call me be your name it is necessary to reconstruct, albeit briefly, the troubled story that led to its creation.
It all begins when American producers Peter Spears and Howard Rosenman purchase the rights to André Aciman's novel of the same name. Initially, director James Ivory was called to write the film adaptation (A Room with a View, Maurice, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Howard House, What Remains of the Day etc etc). Soon, however, the film began to pass from hand to hand and the names of possible directors followed one another. Guadagnino comes into play as a location consultant until the Italian director himself proposes a jointly directed film. Project foundered due to excessively high costs.
The final result is a work that is the result of close collaboration between the two authors and in which the two poetics interpenetrate perfectly, giving us a film as beautiful as it is precious.
 
We are in the summer of 1983. The young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) spends the summer idly in his parents' house until yet another student arrives to help his archaeologist father, as every year; Oliver (Armie Hammer).
A controversial relationship is immediately established between the two, initially based on distrust and perhaps also on Elio's envy towards that older and more self-confident boy who seems to attract admiration of everyone, especially the countless girls present.
While Elio flirts with Marzia (Esther Garrel), the attraction towards Oliver grows which will lead to a love destined to end in the short summer period but which will change the two protagonists forever Weekend by Andrew Haigh. In fact, both films talk about loves that are born and die within a short time, forever overwhelming the lives of those who experience them.
Guadagnino, however, for his part, constructs a film that is absolutely out of time, a characteristic that is its strong point and which, paradoxically, can lend itself to the most heated criticism.
Never as in this case does everything depend on the spectator.
Because, let's be clear, the Italian director presents us with a reality that could disturb quite a bit.
Although Call me be your name is profoundly characterized from a historical point of view, both for the references to the Craxi government and in some scenes such as that of the dance (with that significant detail of the shoes), at the time the world he describes to us, in some ways, is an idealized cultured and refined bucolic society.
It is above all here that Ivory's influence is felt. The reality in which Elio moves is that of a splendid country house surrounded by greenery, inhabited by two cultured and rich parents, where time passes peacefully between swimming and archaeological finds.
One could object that it is too easy to live freely homosexual love, complete with an age difference, in such a refined and clearly progressive and liberal environment.
Instead, in our opinion, this very choice is the film's greatest strength.
Call me be your name is a work proudly out of time, set in an idealized world, a thousand miles away from the violence and vulgarity of our contemporary world.
And yet, despite this, the passion that arises between the two boys does not lose a crumb of his overwhelming burning strength typical of youth.
Even the directorial choices speak of a delicacy and modesty that are now, unfortunately, definitively lost, just think of the camera movement that moves from the entwined bodies of the two boys towards the window, something that, at the cinema, we hadn't seen for years.
The modesty towards feelings and sex, however, does not at all prevent the film from possessing an extraordinary sensuality, perhaps since the time of Derek Jarman the naked male bodies did not express such a powerful and unscrupulous eros.
Finally, Guadagnino's touch fully explodes in the vitality expressed above all by the youth of Elio, a character who could easily fall into the cliché of the grumpy young man, closed in on himself himself and which the director instead paints magnificently.
Call me be your name will probably be ignored at the Oscars as it already happened at the Golden Globes but it doesn't matter.
We are however dealing with a film which, as we said at the beginning, it is beautiful and important.
Important precisely because of the discussion it carries forward, magnificently contained in the final dialogue between father and son, in which the former confesses to his son that he never had the courage to live his existence to the full and urges his son to be fully himself without being afraid.
Here we find the final choice made by Maurice in Ivory's film of the same name; Elio will decide to follow his heart to the end, until that magnificent final close-up on his tears.
The summer love is over, Oliver has gone away forever and has chosen to return to the ranks of the " bourgeois normality. For Elio, however, that summer led to full awareness and acceptance of his homosexuality.
In an era in which racism, homophobia and fascism raise their heads again, grace, modesty, delicacy and the hymn to the freedom of Guadagnino are precious and fundamental teachings.
 
P.S. As always, our advice is to see the film in the original version in which multiple languages ​​are spoken; English, French, Italian, good fragments in German and even dialect. A linguistic richness killed by the usual dubbing that doesn't care about anything.
 
EMILIANO BAGLIO