Why Is CALL ME BY YOUR NAME The Year’s Most Mainstream Gay Film?

It’s not the worst, but it may be the blandest.

(Note: this review contains spoilers.)

Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, adapted from André Aciman’s novel, is the most buzzed-about gay-themed film of the year in the U.S. It’s also the safest and most middlebrow: the presence of James Ivory as screenwriter and co-producer should be a warning sign. Guadagnino’s idea of beauty is thoroughly shallow: endless shots of sunny summertime Tuscan landscapes and the bare torsos of actors Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet. This is a tourist’s-eye-view film, although to its credit, it’s upfront about that. You’d never guess that its director is filming his own country, although a small percentage of the dialogue is in Italian. All three of the lead male characters are American.

But in other ways, it reflects a sensibility that departs from American culture. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME tells the story of a summer-long fling between 17-year-old Elio Perlman (Chalamet) and Oliver (Hammer), a 24-year-old grad student working as an intern for his scholarly father (Michael Stuhlbarg), in 1983. The word “gay” is only occasionally used in the film. In one scene, Elio goes down on his female friend Marzia (Esther Garrel), although in a pattern that will be repeated, the camera cuts away before anything explicit happens. After leaving the Perlman home, Oliver announces that he is in a relationship with a woman. Neither character is exclusively drawn to the same sex, and while Guadagnino has announced a series of films depicting them, he has also said that Elio will turn out to be heterosexual.

Reviewing the Turkish film STEAM in the now-defunct paper NEW YOK PRESS in 1998, critic Godfrey Cheshire wrote that “Europeans… don’t seem to grasp our commodified, Berlin Wall view of sexuality. They make films in which ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ describe what people do, not what they intrinsically are. Such movies assume that there are no immutable categories, that people change as the situations around them do, and that variety is the spice of life.”” This is the exact view behind CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, but the way Guadagnino and Ivory play it out reflects a vision of sexuality in the ’80s that seems utopian in some respects, while denying the likelihood of two men sharing a life together.

One reason CALL ME BY YOUR NAME may be so popular right now might be a good one: its view of a same-sex relationship is essentially free of angst over gay identity. Overt homophobia doesn’t exist in its world. That’s far from saying that Elio and Oliver are happy with each other all the time; as you can tell from my plot description, they don’t walk off into the sunset together or even make plans to meet up again the following summer. But if they don’t identify what they’re doing as “gay,” the problems caused by their relationship stem from the tensions two lovers of any gender might experience.

However, Guadagnino does a careful — and, ultimately, cowardly — balancing act between the demands of the stereotypical gay male and heterosexual moviegoer. He delivers fan service through having his couple keep their shirts off for at least a third of the film. He does show their butts briefly. But there is no full frontal nudity or explicit sex in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. When Elio and Oliver get in bed, the camera suddenly takes a tracking shot out the window and focuses on a tree outside. Cut to the two lovers post-orgasmically intertwined. The scene in which Elio masturbates into a peach seems designed mostly to prove the film isn’t puritanical. Barry Jenkins’ MOONLIGHT was equally guilty of such reticence, but there, it made more sense in the context of the life story of a man who had only had sex once in his life (and that act was depicted on-screen, even if very obliquely, unlike any of the sex in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME.) Elio is far less repressed. In both films, one senses that shying away from gay male sex is the price of entry to the mainstream, although this seemed much less calculated in MOONLIGHT (whose director is heterosexual.)

Contrast that scene in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME with the one in Robin Campillo’s BPM (BEATS PER MINUTE) where an HIV-negative and HIV-positive man begin anal sex, stop so that the latter can tell the story of how he got infected, and enthusiastically resume again. Neither film contains full frontal nudity and the sex scene in BPM was shot with the actors’ pants on, but BPM is so gleefully upfront about its eroticism that one might only realize that by reading an interview with Campillo and the actors. Francis Lee’s GOD’S OWN COUNTRY also contains scenes of two men making out with such delight that I incorrectly assumed that the actors had to be gay.

You can see the downside of Guadagnino’s aspirations towards accessibility and universality from the enthusiastic reception CALL ME BY YOUR NAME received from the generally sexist and homophobic film critic Jeffrey Wells, who wrote “I like my gay movies to feel swoony and speak softly — I want them to feel mellow and cultured and graced with the aroma of fine wine, fresh peaches and tall grass on a warm summer’s day. No offense but BPM is on the other side of the canyon, enraged and odorous and generally obnoxious.” Wells composed that with blithering obliviousness to how noxious his words would sound to any gay readers.

I disliked much of the work directed by Ivory for its quasi-literary qualities, and its pseudo-intellectual pretentions are still present in his script for CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. When Oliver and Elio’s father argue about whether the word “apricot” really originated in Arabic, one can sense Ivory showing off his erudition. The same effect comes across when Elio jokingly says he just played a piano piece as Liszt performing Bach. The film is also strewn with references to the Jewishness of both Oliver and Elio’s family (source novelist Aciman is originally of Egyptian-Jewish descent), but these never add up to anything much; if it’s trying to parallel what it’s like being a religious and sexual minority, it has too thin a grasp on either.

But just when I felt safe in dismissing in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME as mediocre pandering, it comes up with two extremely moving scenes. In the first one, Elio’s father recognizes the extent to which he’s been hurt by Oliver’s departure and subsequent rejection of him. While initially calling Elio and Oliver’s relationship a “friendship,” Elio’s father clearly understands that they were more than simply friends and goes on to verbally acknowledge that. His awkwardness feels very ’80s, and perhaps still true of most parents trying to come to terms with their teenage sons’ sleeping with other males. Stuhlbarg’s performance plays out the way his character addresses his conflicting emotions and eventually succeeds in letting his better nature come to the fore.

Bland indie singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens contributes two new songs to the CALL ME BY YOUR NAME soundtrack. The second plays out over the ending credits, and it gains a surprising power in context. As the credits roll, Chalamet simply stares into a fireplace. All of the emotions he has experienced in the film now seem to be running in his head. While activity and sound continue in the background, the scene, again, gains its power almost entirely from acting. Here, Guadagnino reduces its elements to a bare minimum: he has more faith in the emotional force of Stevens’ music than it deserves, and the frame is filled with a medium shot of Chalamet’s face. As sparing as this is, it’s far more adventurous filmmaking than the bulk of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, and a better argument for his merits as a director than all the “beautiful” images of the Italian countryside in July with which he filled his film’s earlier parts.

While set in 1983, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME may reflect attitudes that are more common today and embodied by celebrities like singer Frank Ocean, who is honest both as a person and lyricist about being attracted to men but refuses to put any kind of label on his sexuality. Guadagnino and Ivory themselves are openly gay, while Hammer and Chalamet are heterosexual. At best, this film reflects an openness to sexual fluidity and a freedom from narrow constraints of political demands around sexuality; at worst, its depiction of a male couple who aren’t exactly gay caters to heterosexual squeamishness about both queer sex and identity. Like the music of Sam Smith or the sitcom MODERN FAMILY, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME shows the effects of the mainstreaming of gayness as comfortable white men in North America and Europe are able to depart from its countercultural roots. (This need not always be negative, but I would rather see something akin to an action movie like JOHN WICK with a gay protagonist.) There have been better films about gay men released in 2017 — the aforementioned BPM and GOD’S OWN COUNTRY, BEACH RATS, NOBODY’S WATCHING — but their total gross is likely to be a fraction of that of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME.