Nov 16, 2021
His disapproval of Call Me By Your Name’s coy cuts and lack of nudity (it wouldn’t have happened if they had stuck to page 78 of his screenplay, he tuts) underlines his own refusal to pan away from full-frontal moments. The penises of friends and partners are described with the cool, precise language of an auction-house catalogue: his lover Bruce Chatwin, for example, is recorded “in the interest of England’s literary history” as having an “uncut, rosy, schoolboy-looking ready cock”; elsewhere, there is a “dangling pink foreskin” and a “heavy, charged … end-of-the-garden-hose variety”. Solid Ivory is in no way a book of wild abandon or lurid sensation, but it’s not all meaningful glances in a Florentine pensione.
James Ivory, Solid Ivory
