A film about a summer romance between a twenty-five year old man and his employer’s seventeen year old son in Italy during the 1980s may well not be up your strada but I have seen it and will try and make you change your mind.
Call Me by Your Name is directed by Luca Guadagnino and loosely follows the theme of desire established in two of his previous films: I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015), both of which are excellent. This time he engaged James Ivory to write the screenplay – he who directed so many EM Forster novels for the screen with his partner, Ismail Merchant. In fact Ivory’s script was too sexually explicit for the film to be a commercial success and had to be watered down, thank goodness.
The two protagonists are Oliver played by Armie Hammer, an unlikely choice as he has been in so many turkeys, and Elio played by Timothée Chalamet. Incidentally neither are gay – they’re actors. Not much to say about Armie except that he is descended from Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum. Plenty to say about TC. He was born in Manhattan in 1995 with an American mother and a French father and has been acting since he was thirteen. In Call Me by Your Name he is required to speak English, French and Italian fluently and to play piano and guitar. He went to Italy three months before shooting started to brush up – as he put it – his Italian and piano playing and to learn the guitar. Armie Hammer also speaks Italian and French in the subtitled film.
It was shot over five weeks in May/June 2016, when TC was twenty-one, in Lombardy. It is a top tip to be in a film made in Italy; you only work eight hours a day so there’s time to chill in the evenings. There were no sets or soundstage and it rained almost every day which was challenging for Thai cinematographer, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. How he created the dazzling Italian sunshine that drenches every scene beats me. The villa where the family lives, its grounds, the surrounding countryside and the local towns are a visual feast. The soundtrack is a mixture of pop in the 1980s idiom and piano pieces by Bach and Ravel. It all adds up to a beautiful film which may have you reaching for a hankie. Here is the trailer.