Call Me By Your Name is the kind of movie that makes you sit through the credits with tears rolling down your face, staring blankly at the screen with a lump in your throat and tightness in your chest. Not because it was sad or heartbreaking or outrageous, but because it triggered something inside of you, and you’re not really sure how to stop it. As if it pierced a hole through your being, but you can’t figure out how or where and you can’t seem to identify the source of the leak.
So you leak. You overflow with emotions. You’re happy and you’re sad and you’re angry and you’re grateful and you’re unsure. And you just leak.
Call Me By Your Name is not a tragic movie. It’s not a sad movie. It’s not a pretentious movie. It’s a movie about love, and love, and love. A beautiful love that will leave you longing to find your own love and drown in it. That will make you want to run out in the streets, and scream at the top of your lungs in the middle of traffic, and try to look for love wherever you can find it. Call Me By Your Name is an intelligent, sexy, funny, quirky, relatable, deep, emotional, and heartbreaking masterpiece. It will make you feel, and it will make you laugh, and it will make you think, and it will make you cry.
Timothée Chalamet is an absolute force of nature. He is Elio and Elio is the heart and soul of the movie. Everybody is in love with Elio. He is the sweetest and smartest boy, and he oozes confidence but he doesn’t realize it. He is more than comfortable in his skin but he struggles to like himself the way he ought to like himself. And perhaps it’s what really brings him so close to Oliver. Both of them think little of themselves and the world of the other.
Elio is so affectionate and so passionate. He kisses and hugs and moves from one set of arms or legs to the next and he revels in it. He is beautiful, and smart, and talented, and awkward, and incredibly sexual, and sensual. Elio wants what he wants. Elio is not in the business of hiding what he truly craves. He tries for a little while but then he just goes straight for it. He’s not shy. He opens his mouth big and wide, craving it, asking for it, desperate for it. He licks Oliver’s lips and fingers, and he climbs him, and straddles him, and hugs him, and throws himself at him whenever he gets the chance. He just wants him any way he can have him, but he’s still nervous and real and coy and shy. Elio will make you want to love, and hurt, and piece yourself back together with absolutely no regrets whatsoever. Elio will make you want to live your life to the fullest. Elio will make you want to break your own damn heart. It’s so rare that a performance truly shows the depth of longing, and despair, and passion a character conveys through written words without the internal monologue. And Timothée Chalamet truly did Elio justice. He was Elio and Elio was him.
Elio and Oliver will make you want to find a lover the moment you leave the screening. They will make you crave that intimacy and level of trust. They will make you want to love, and hurt, and give in to your deepest and truest desires. Their bond is just so incredibly powerful without ever being overly sexualized, or vulgar, or cheap. Their bond is a bond of the heart, and the mind, and the soul, and the body. Not just the body. Armie Hammer is absolutely brilliant in the way he humanizes Oliver who is somewhat glorified through Elio’s lens in the first part of the book. In the movie, Oliver is endearing and human and sexy and caring. He cares for Elio, and his love for him is so tender and so touching. His face falls when Elio gets a nosebleed and it’s the most touching thing. He kisses his foot, and Elio touches his neck laughs, and they’re the most touching thing.
Watch this movie. Watch it, and love it, and don’t let it fall victim to overhype. Watch this movie. Fall in love in two hours and twelve minutes, then question every single time you didn’t allow yourself to feel just because you were afraid of getting hurt. Was avoiding a possible heartbreak that might have shattered you worth never getting a taste of the heavens? Was killing the potential pain and heartache worth it? Was it worth it?
Don’t kill it. Feel it. Bask in it. Bathe in it. Remember it. Cherish it. Let it keep you warm when you have nothing else and no one else to hold you at night. Don’t kill it. Let it kill you. Let it shatter you. Then let it fill you with love, and love, and love, and love, and love.
annaxmalina
