I need you to tell me what you think Call Me By Your Name is about
Because either I’m right, and I love Call Me By Your Name, or everyone else is right, and I (stubbornly, brattily) hate it*. CMBYN is either meant to look at a deeply, almost dangerously, flawed relationship that still means a great deal to the subjugated half, OR, meant as a romantic, softly told story of two men finding each other and equally falling into something that, if not true love, at least feels a lot like it. If the former, I say it almost hit the mark, with a few big missteps. If the latter, I feel pretty fucking uncomfortable about the whole thing, tbh.
(*I don’t hate anything. As my dad always says, “Hitler hated the Jews.” In this case, I would only strongly dislike the movie.)
What I saw when I watched CMBYN was a young person (man, in this case), taken with an older visitor (also a man, in this case). An extremely attractive, well-liked, and intelligent older visitor, who obviously ranks high in social esteem with those around him. Someone who, for all intents and purposes, already holds all of the power over a younger person, even before he starts positioning himself into a place of power.
And it’s this positioning of himself over Elio that makes me most disgusted with Oliver, and most reluctant to take the film as the romance others proclaim it to be. While already his elder in years (25 to Elio’s 17 — which I personally don’t think has to be a problem), Oliver continually inserts and asserts himself into and onto Elio’s life. No one in or on this film seems to acknowledge, or even notice, their discrepancy — never does Oliver relinquish any of his power to Elio, and Elio never makes it clear whether or not he enjoys their “game.” And that’s the problem, really, the one-sided “game” these two play throughout the film. Is it a fair game if only one person has all the pieces? Can it even be called a “game,” when only one person controls the board?
This cat and mouse dynamic up top could be forgiven, if we ever saw Oliver’s truth. But, thanks to the very last scene, we find out that not only has Oliver set a date for his wedding — and, theoretically, was either already engaged or in a serious relationship before he came to Italy — but that his relationship with Elio wasn’t even honest. When Elio whispers, “why didn’t you tell me?” over the phone, my heart breaks. It’s not that Oliver was, or is, deceitful for being with a woman, nor am I condemning him for having a perhaps subtextually complicated relationship with his sexuality. The problem is that Elio and Oliver were never really equals — by Oliver’s design. He never tried to tell Elio, only to be told “I don’t care,” or, “I don’t want to know.” Elio never gets to decide anything for himself, not really.
Because even his attraction to Oliver is out of Elio’s control, a bodily response we’ve all been subjected to. And the grad student knows it — when he touches Elio’s shoulders, he knows what that flinch really means — and he knows what he’s doing by immediately calling a girl over to rub Elio’s shoulders instead. It’s his way of saying, I know who you really are, and I know what you really want, but I’m going to make you hide it. (Maybe it’s a knock on Armie’s acting skills that, later, when he says Elio’s flinch made him question himself, I rolled my eyes so hard I thought they might break. Maybe we really were supposed to believe he had a moment of doubt. I did not.) Even the Big Line, “Call me by your name, and I’ll call you by mine,” feels a bizarre blurring of the boundaries between the two. Like less of a clean exchange between symbiotes than an erasure of who Elio is, and a false promise of what he and Oliver could be.
Personally, one of the most chilling scenes in CMBYN is when Elio’s mother — sitting beside her son — conspiratorially mentions that Oliver is so fond of Elio, and why can’t Elio be a little nicer? Despite the fact that, moments before in an earlier scene, Oliver was obviously brusque and standoffish to Elio. This sort of dissonance, of a person acting one way while others tell you they mean another, is a dirty trick. It not only puts Elio in the bizarre place of doubting his own intuition, signals, and feelings, but it positions him as the angsty, angry boy, who just can’t tell when someone’s being nice to him. Now Elio not only has to doubt himself in reference to Oliver, but in reference to his parents as well.
The infamous monologue delivered by Elio’s dad to his son is a beautiful piece of writing (although, if he’s not intoning that he himself is closeted, I feel a little bad for his hot French wife in the other room like “Ummm, what do you mean you’ve never had anything like that before??”) But it’s a beautiful piece of writing that seems to have been meant for a different movie. His definitive position that whatever his son had, “was beautiful,” is gonna fuck Elio up years from now when he describes what happened with Oliver to a friend who’s like “Woah, what? That sounds weird,” and he’ll realize his parents didn’t really protect him the way they should have. And it’s not wrong to tell your son that he shouldn’t close himself off to the world; that feeling sorrow is the inevitable flipside of joy’s coin. But by ignoring the circumstances under which Elio felt this way, his father does a great disservice to his son. He doesn’t even ask Elio how he feels — he dumps a grand proclamation of vicarious love onto his son, then walks away. There’s a chance lost here to show a real conversation between a father and his coming-of-age son. It’s a beautiful monologue in a scene that needed a dialogue.
I think CMBYN succeeds extremely well at portraying a realistic relationship between a young person struggling to find out what they want and an older person who knows exactly what they want, and gets it. I think it succeeds extremely well at showing how confusing that kind of relationship can be. I think it could have succeeded extremely well at asserting there can be value found in any relationship, if you feel you have found value. I think it could have succeeded at showing how difficult love and lust can be for anyone, anywhere, anytime. I think it could have offered an interesting dialogue about the types of emotional deals marginalized people find themselves making, for better or for worse.
I think either the movie is confused, or I am. And I need to say now, that I am not a gay man (duh). I am not trying to take away anything from anyone who enjoyed — or connected with — the movie. I do not want to say that your interpretation of art is less valid, or what you took away does not matter (because it does). Once art leaves the artist’s hands, it becomes ours, to make of it what we will. What you make of it will not be the same as what I make of it, and that’s worth a great deal. As I said earlier, I do not want a monologue when there should be a dialogue. And when it comes to CMBYN — like all good art — there’s a lot to talk about.
