Why “Call Me By Your Name” is an Important Film

Set in 1983 “somewhere in Northern Italy”, Call Me By Your Name tells a tale of first love between two men and a subsequent coming of age. Elio, played by Timothee Chalamet, is a bookish music prodigy, and at the ripe age of seventeen, he meets the new live-in grad student who will reside in their home as his father’s academic assistant for six weeks during the summer. His name is Oliver, respectively portrayed by the handsome Armie Hammer, who becomes the figure of distant longing for Elio while he discovers different parts of himself and of life that cannot be read in a book.

Without boring the viewer, Call Me By Your Name starts off slow. As a director, Luca Guadagnino does this by gently motioning the viewer into Elio’s introspective world. For the first half of the film, there are drawn out sequences of him transcribing music, bike riding through the villa, and eating breakfast with his adoring parents, chatting seamlessly in English, Italian and French.

Elio, Call Me By Your Name

These sequences are complemented with wide shots of the dream-like Italian landscape that become a definitive character in of themselves throughout the film. The calm that is drawn out from film’s slowness dramatically contrasts with the majority of modern cinema gives the viewers what they want right away. The slow start is also something incredibly reflective of the love story that plays out on screen.

Oliver, Call Me By Your Name

Elio is enamoured by the twenty-four year old Oliver, who can be seen as everything Elio isn’t. Oliver jumps off his bike with easy grace, he drinks juice in fervid gulps, he shimmies solo on dance floors – he’s confidence without pretension. It’s Oliver’s obvious self-acceptance that Elio both envies and desires. Elio is pictured quiet and withdrawn, shifting in his body as he slouches and shuffles restlessly. His admiration for Oliver is first seen only through wistful glances and boyish flirting that implies more by what is unsaid. Timothee Chalamet, an actor I’m sure we’ll all see more of in due time, captures the character of Elio perfectly by saying more with a look than he does with his words.

Although, the most refreshing aspect of Call Me By Your Name is its lack of an antagonist commonly seen in queer films. The only antagonism is Elio and Oliver’s hesitancy. It is at a fateful moment by a war memorial, breaking through his layers of apprehension, that Elio decides to indirectly tell Oliver how he feels. It’s the moment when an unrequited love becomes requited and his true self unfolds. 

When viewing Call Me By Your Name at the Bytowne cinema downtown, I was enchanted at how real this film felt. The screen became the eyes of a resident of Elio’s home. And the story isn’t just told visually, but also audibly. The actors speak over cars that drive by and Church bells that ring – birds chirp, flies buzz and doors slam. While the two men fall in love, we are all effectively transported into their world and it makes us feel like we’re there.

I think this film is important because it asks powerful questions with subtlety. Is it better to speak or to die? Is better to feel nothing so as not to feel anything? It challenges people who may have originally been skeptical or embarrassed by intimacy between two men but proves that love is love is love. Elio’s father delivers an incredibly powerful speech that encourages his son to love and feel fully without fear of the pain that comes with it. Though I have never fallen in love, after seeing this film I hope welcome such intimacy with another human being, even if there is a chance it will end.

The film ends with both young men still in love, and with heartbreak. Elio explored his own sexuality, with men and women, and a once bookish teenager becomes a young man who participates in his own life. With this, the characters leave the summer unpunished. Call Me By Your Name will stay with me for a very long time. My advice before watching: be patient with it and let the story sink in. There weren’t many dry eyes when I left the theatre, but in the end, to avoid something that makes you feel – “what a waste!”

 

My “Lady Bird” Film Review

I’ve been fancying myself with writers and narratives that capture the facets of female complexity. Fittingly, while sitting in the quant Ottawa Bytowne Theatre awaiting the start of “Lady Bird”, I read the first pages of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion, a prominent thinker and writer of the late twentieth century, who also happened to be a woman. A few moments later, a 1979 epigraph by Didion would fade onto the screen in black and white:

“Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent Christmas in Sacramento.”

Director Greta Gerwig and Joan Didion, I would later find out are both from Sacramento. As with Christine McPherson, but as she so often corrects people, is Lady Bird – a name “given to me by me”, she explains. And that sets the premise for the story: a girl who demands a different flavour of life from the one the one that was given to her.

Before her directorial debut with Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig had a pretty successful acting career.  She spent her times on set as an opportunity to learn, observing and asking the directors question like a makeshift film school. A coming-of-age story is what Gerwig set out to create, deviating from the male-oriented algorithm that they usually follow. And in the simplest of conclusions, it was a masterful success.

“Lady Bird” tells the title character’s coming-of-age story in Sacramento in between the years of 2002 and 2003. In the final year of her Catholic high school, Lady Bird (played by Saoirse Ronan) desperately wants to leave the suburban wasteland of Sacramento and go to New York City for college, where the culture is. As protagonists go, she’s driven by a bravado and naivety that only young protagonists can encapsulate, fittingly juxtaposing the weary, disciplinary Mother who can, at times, be perceived as the antagonist.

Gerwig successfully examines the world that Lady Bird lives in, not with a critical lens, but with an observant one. So many little specificities of the film stick out to me, from the kilted Catholic uniforms, to the strategically placed early-2000s pop tracks, to the subtle backdrop of post-9/11 tensions and war overseas.

It is through Gerwig’s observant and specific lens that we get a zeroed-in narrative, lacking any political agenda, simply telling a story of a girl wanting more in a specific place, in a specific time. And she does this while simultaneously making it touch just about anyone who sees it.

Out of every shining detail, the most engaging part has to the be the central focus of the film; the relationship between Lady Bird and her Mother (played by Laurie Metcalfe). Because, while I had mentioned that she can, at times, be the antagonist, she is also the other half of Lady Bird’s tumultuous love story.

While this film could’ve fallen under the wide umbrella of female coming-of-age tales that are always aligned with the girl’s love for a boy, this film deviated from this in the best way possible way. It is in their mother-daughter relationship – the screaming-in-your-face, pushing-every-button, so-different-but-the-same relationship – that is so reflective of that contemporary dynamic that I was brought back to own life just a few years ago. It is so reflective of my own life, that I think that’s why my brother, a domestic observer of my relationship with our Mother, was the one who recommended I see “Lady Bird”. And why, just a week after seeing it the first time, saw it again but this time with her at my side.

“Lady Bird” is a breath of fresh air, and probably my favourite film of the year. Much like the confidence and authenticity found in pen of Saramento’s Joan Didion, Greta Gerwig created a vivacious girl whose story captures the some of the facets of female complexity and authenticity. It taught me that love and attention are usually one in the same, and that one’s coming of age is another person’s letting go. It is a love story to hometowns, high schools, douchebags, best friends, and Mothers alike, and I cherished every moment of it.