call me by your name book essay

The Literary Edit

Review: Call Me By Your Name – André Aciman

Despite the fact that in two weeks time, winter will officially be upon us in Sydney, the past week or so has seen the sort of balmy temperatures one might hope for during a UK summer. While the mornings are cooler; and the days shorter, the midday heat has been warm enough to justify an hour or two spent lounging on the beach, watching the ocean sparkle under the autumn sun. And thus it was, that before winter takes hold, and the days of sandy feet and sun-cooked skin are nothing but a distant memory that I wanted to squeeze in a read of André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. While I’m a voracious reader all year round, a book set on the Italian Riviera is best read in sunnier climes, rather than curled up in bed with the rain beating down against the window pane.

For me, the book was something of a slow starter, though that might be attributed to the fact that I was reading it sporadically to begin with; a couple of pages here, a chapter there. For as soon as I sat down without my phone, laptop, or to-do list as a distraction, I was immediately engrossed with Aciman’s heady tale of a restless summer romance.

The story follows seventeen-year-old Elio and his father’s American house guest Oliver during a hot and heady six weeks at the family’s cliffside Italian villa. When Elio and Oliver develop an unlikely friendship it soon develops into a love affair, made all the more intense due to the balmy Italian and very beautiful landscape that acts as a backdrop to their developing feelings. As the story progresses, their relationship intensifies, but alas the impending summer sojourn coming to an end presses upon them.

Ripe with poetic and powerful prose, Call Me By Your Name is an evocative and atmospheric story that sweeps its readers away to the sun-soaked shores of the Italian Riviera. An intoxicating tale of infatuation, intimacy and overwhelm and of love and the suffering that often ensues, Call Me By Your Name is a beautiful coming of age story that will resonate with readers of all ages and act as a reminder of the careless and intense sort of love that fades with the seasons, but is lasting and long-lived.

Call Me By Your Name Book Synopsis

Call Me by Your Name  is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman’s frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion.  Call Me by Your   Name  is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.

About André Aciman

André Aciman is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the director of The Writers’ Institute. He is the author of  Call Me by Your Name ,  Out of Egypt: A Memoir ,  False Papers ,  Alibis ,  Eight White Nights ,  Harvard Square , and  Enigma Variations . He is the co-author and editor of  Letters of Transit  and of  The Proust Project . André is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a fellowship from The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for publications including  The New York Times ,  The New Yorker ,  The New Republic ,  The New York Review of Books  and several volumes of  Best American Essays . He is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays.

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3 comments on “Review: Call Me By Your Name – André Aciman”

I saw the film in late-March 2018 and it immediately became my favourite movie of all time. Everything about it was absolutely 100% beautiful and there were a lot of things about the story and the characters that I could directly relate to. After I watched the film, I ran out and bought the book – I had heard that the book jumps ahead 15-20 years and I was desperate to find out what had happened between Elio and Oliver.

I don’t often cry whilst reading, but the final chapter of Call Me By Your Name had me crying like A BABY! I absolutely loved it, just as much as I did the movie. What an incredible story 🙂

Thanks for stopping by Vanessa! I agree, it really is such a beautiful book, and the last chapter is very moving indeed. How does the film compare? I’ve heard great things about it but not from someone who’s read the book as well and I’m always nervous about watching the film of a book I’ve adored xo

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By Stacey D’Erasmo

• Feb. 25, 2007

This novel is hot. A coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a Proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation and something of an epitaph, “Call Me by Your Name” is also an open question. It is an exceptionally beautiful book that cannot quite bring itself to draw the inevitable conclusion about axis-shifting passion that men and women of the world might like to think they will always reach — that that obscure object of desire is, by definition, ungraspable, indeterminate and already lost at exactly the moment you rush so fervently to hold him or her. The heat is in the longing, the unavailability as we like to say, the gap, the illusion, etc. But what André Aciman considers, elegantly and with no small amount of unbridled skin-to-skin contact, is that maybe the heat of eros isn’t only in the friction of memory and anticipation. Maybe it’s also in the getting. In a first novel that abounds in moments of emotional and physical abandon, this may be the most wanton of his moves: his narrative, brazenly, refuses to stay closed. It is as much a story of paradise found as it is of paradise lost.

The literal story is a tale of adolescent sexual awakening, set in the very well-appointed home of an academic, on the Italian Riviera, in the mid-1980s. Elio, the precocious 17-year-old son of the esteemed and open-minded scholar and his wife, falls fast and hard for Oliver, a 24-year-old postdoc teaching at Columbia, who has come to the mansion for six weeks to revise his manuscript — on Heraclitus, since this is a novel about time and love — before publication. Elio is smart, nervous, naïve, but also bold; Oliver is handsome, seductive and breezily American, given to phrases like “Later,” and abundantly “O.K. with” many things Elio is less O.K. with — O.K. with being Jewish, “with his body, with his looks, with his antic backhand, with his choice of books, music, films, friends.” From the first page, we know we’re in the crumbling terrain of memory. “I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy,” Elio writes from some later vantage point. Which is also, of course, to say: I am not in Italy now, I am not that young man, what I am going to describe is long over. Heraclitus, indeed.

The younger Elio has apparently been more or less heterosexual until Oliver arrives, but in fewer than 15 pages he’s already in a state he calls the “swoon.” He lies around on his bed in the long Mediterranean afternoons hoping Oliver will walk in, feeling “fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this and I’ll die if he doesn’t knock at my door, but I’d sooner he never knock than knock now. I had learned to leave my French windows ajar, and I’d lie on my bed wearing only my bathing suit, my entire body on fire. Fire like a pleading that says, Please, please, tell me I’m wrong, tell me I’ve imagined all this, because it can’t possibly be true for you as well, and if it’s true for you too, then you’re the cruelest man alive.”

But it is true for Oliver, and he does knock, and then things really heat up. What Elio and Oliver do to a peach, for instance, might have made T. S. Eliot take a match to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Aciman, who has written so exquisitely about exile, loss and Proust in his book of essays, “False Papers,” and his memoir, “Out of Egypt,” is no less exquisite here in his evocation of Elio’s adoration for the lost city of Oliver’s body and the lost city of the love between the two men. He builds these lost cities with the extraordinary craftsmanship of obsession, carefully imagining every last element of Elio’s affair with Oliver, depicting even the slightest touches and most mundane conversations with a nearly hyper-real attention to how, exactly, each one articulated a desire in Elio that felt “like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life?” Aciman never curbs or mocks Elio’s unabashed adolescent romanticism, never wheels in repressive social forces to crush the lovers, never makes one the agent of the other’s ruin. Even Elio’s father is fairly “que será, será” about what he suspects has been going on (a lot) under his scholarly roof.

What unwinds the men from each other’s embrace is none of these clichés; instead, Aciman, Proustian to the core, moves them apart, renders their beautiful city Atlantis, with the subtlest, most powerful universal agent: time. Nobody gets clocked with a tire iron. No one betrays the other. One becomes ordinary and marries; the other’s romantic fate is vague but seems to be more patchy. They meet again, 15 years later, and they’re not tragic; all they are is older. The fully adult Elio thinks, “This thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him.” They “can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it. ... Going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false.” In a book that seems to wear its heart on its sleeve, this openhanded, open-ended gesture is also its most knowing, challenging moment. That the city of desire is a scrim, all “dream making and strange remembrance,” Aciman seems to say, doesn’t mean it would be any less false not to walk into it. And if the novel is mourning this city, it is also, brick by brick, rebuilding it before the reader’s eyes.

In his essay “Pensione Eolo,” Aciman writes, “Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss.” In other words, Elio and Oliver might give each other up, but the book that conjures them doesn’t give up either one. In fact, it brings them back together, reunites them, for a glorious endless summer. In the book, the river can be revisited. The closing words echo the title: a phrase simultaneously of elegy and of invitation.

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Call Me By Your Name

André aciman.

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Elio spends each summer with his academic parents in the small Italian village of B. Each year, the family hosts young American scholars who come to live in Italy while working on a book project. When Elio is seventeen, his family invites a twenty-four-year-old Columbia professor named Oliver to live with them for six weeks. Upon Oliver’s arrival, Elio is drawn to him but doesn’t quite understand why, taking special care to give him a nice tour of the town and paying close attention to the way he presents himself. He’s impressed by Oliver’s “billowy” shirt that opens onto his chest and the casual, confident way he moves through the world. At the same time, he also begins to resent Oliver’s relaxed attitude, which seems insulting. For instance, whenever Oliver leaves the house, he says “ Later! ”—a way of saying goodbye Elio has never heard and dislikes for its “indifference.”

Elio and Oliver make a habit of working together in the mornings by the pool. While Elio works on a musical score at the outdoor table, Oliver makes changes to his manuscript on a blanket in the grass. After lunch, he moves to the edge of the pool to read, saying, “This is heaven.” As such, he dubs this spot “heaven,” or the orle of paradise . Each day, Elio watches him luxuriate, periodically asking if he’s asleep. When Oliver isn’t dozing, he makes conversation with Elio, asking what he’s thinking about or talking to him about complex academic ideas, always impressed by Elio’s ability to engage in sophisticated intellectual conversations. Often, their conversations take sudden turns and become emotionally charged, as Elio constantly tries to determine the best thing to say and is sometimes offended by Oliver’s mood swings—one moment, Oliver will be playful and encouraging, and the next he’ll be cold and uninterested, gazing at Elio with a “chilly” look.

Eventually, Elio comes to understand that he’s attracted to Oliver, but he can’t bring himself to act upon his feelings. Instead, he tries to hide his emotions while simultaneously hoping Oliver will do something to acknowledge the energy flowing between them. At the same time, though, he balks whenever Oliver gives him an opportunity to reveal his feelings. One day, for instance, Oliver comes up behind him on the tennis court, throws an arm around him and with the other massages his shoulder, saying he seems tight. Elio is instantly overwhelmed and shrinks from Oliver’s touch. “A moment longer and I would have slackened,” he notes. Taken aback, Oliver apologizes, saying he must have pinched a nerve, though Elio later realizes that he must have seen through this act. “Knowing, as I later came to learn, how thoroughly trenchant was his ability to sort contradictory signals, I have no doubt that he must have already suspected something,” he writes.

Elio’s preoccupation with Oliver continues throughout the summer. Before long, Oliver starts partying with locals. He even strikes up a romantic relationship with a girl named Chiara , who’s closer in age to Elio. Around this time, Elio starts paying such close attention to Oliver’s moods that he ascribes different “personalities” to each of his four bathing suits: red means he’s “bold, set in his ways, very grown-up, almost gruff and ill-tempered”; yellow means he’s “sprightly, buoyant, funny, not without barbs”; green means he’s “acquiescent, eager to learn, eager to speak, sunny”; and blue is the color he has worn whenever he has showed Elio affection and attention, like when he massaged his shoulder or stepped into his bedroom from their shared balcony or picked up a glass Elio dropped in the grass and said, when Elio told him he didn’t have to do that, that he did it because he wanted to.

While hanging out in town one night with friends, Elio sees Oliver and Chiara walking arm-in-arm. Although Elio and Oliver have been avoiding each other at home—the tension between them palpable—they have a short conversation, disguising their feelings through small talk that they refract through Chiara and the other people present. Despite this roundabout way of communicating, Elio is delighted when Oliver delivers a veiled compliment to him before leaving. Later that night, Elio spends time with a girl named Marzia , who is very obviously attracted to him. “You’re not with me because you’re angry with Chiara?” she asks as they skinny dip in the dark ocean. “Why am I angry with Chiara?” he replies, and she says, “Because of him.” He assures her he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and when they put their clothes on again, he kisses her and tells her to meet him at this spot the following night. She agrees and leaves, though not before instructing him not to tell anybody about their plans.

“We almost did it,” Elio tells his father and Oliver the following day during breakfast. His father asks why they didn’t, and Elio says he doesn’t know, so Oliver says, “Try again later.” Then he adds, “If not later, when?” This phrase haunts Elio, as he applies it to their own relationship, ultimately adding a sense of urgency to their situation. As he turns the sentence over in his mind, he wonders if Oliver has “found [him] out and uncovered each and every one of [his] secrets with those four cutting words.”

Finally, when he can’t take it any longer, Elio expresses his feelings for Oliver. “Do you know what you’re saying?” Oliver asks. “Yes,” Elio replies, “I know what I’m saying and you’re not mistaking any of it.” Having spoken so directly, he waits as Oliver runs inside to visit his translator. When he returns, though, it’s as if the conversation has died away. “I wish I hadn’t spoken,” he says after a while. “I’m going to pretend you never did,” Oliver responds, eventually saying they “can’t talk about such things.”

On the way back from town, Elio leads Oliver to one of his favorite places: Monet’s Berm, where Monet used to paint. Putting their bikes down, they continue their conversation, though they avoid speaking straightforwardly about the fact that they’re attracted to one another. Nonetheless, Oliver eventually admits he has known how Elio feels for a long time, despite how hard Elio has tried to hide it. Then, as if testing the waters, Oliver slides close and gently kisses Elio. “Better now?” he asks, but Elio doesn’t answer because he’s “not so sure” he enjoyed the kiss as much as he’d “expected,” so he decides to “test it again,” this time pressing his lips more passionately to Oliver’s. After a moment, Oliver pulls away and says they should go. “So far we’ve behaved. We’ve been good. Neither of us has done anything to feel ashamed of. Let’s keep it that way,” he says. Considering this, Elio places his hand on Oliver’s crotch, but this doesn’t change anything, and the two ride home for lunch, during which Oliver slides his foot over Elio’s beneath the table. As he presses his sole against the top of Elio’s arch, Elio suddenly gets a nosebleed and has to leave the table. Later, Oliver visits him in his room and asks if the bleeding was his fault. “Are you going to be okay?” he asks. “I thought I was,” Elio says. “I’ll get over it.” That night, Oliver goes out and doesn’t come home until late; Elio is convinced he’s had sex with somebody else.

The following days are tense between Oliver and Elio. Nothing sexual happens between them, and Oliver spends a considerable amount of time with ten-year-old Vimini , a lovable young girl who lives nearby and has leukemia. Meanwhile, Elio advances his relationship with Marzia. At one point, she admits she thinks Elio will end up hurting her, though she kisses him back passionately when he presses her against a wall. Elio’s struck by Marzia’s simultaneous “boldness” and her “sorrow,” amazed that she can speak so straightforwardly about her hesitations and then reach down his pants. Even as he enjoys this moment, he composes a note in his head that he leaves for Oliver later that night. It reads: Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you . Oliver responds the next day with his own note, which says: Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight. When the time finally arrives, Elio sneaks into Oliver’s bed and they have sex. When Oliver penetrates him, the pain makes him consider stopping the entire thing. Oliver notices this and asks if he should stop, but Elio doesn’t respond, and he continues. At one point, Oliver leans down and says, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.”

Although Elio enjoys his experience in Oliver’s bed, something feels off in the aftermath of their lovemaking. Lying against the sheets, he feels disgusted and in pain, wanting more than anything to leave Oliver’s bedroom. He feels as if he doesn’t want to “remember” the experience—he didn’t “hate it,” but nor does he want to think about it. This feeling continues throughout the night and into the morning, and Elio is sure he’ll never again want to sleep with Oliver, though by midday he finds himself flirting with Oliver in a way that is much more sexually charged than before. They decide to have sex again that night. Shortly thereafter, Elio and Marzia go to the beach and have sex.

Elio and Oliver’s relationship intensifies in the last weeks of his stay in Italy. When it’s finally time for Oliver to leave, he invites Elio to come with him to Rome, where he will stay for several days in order to finish his book and meet with his publisher. Elio’s parents allow him to go, and the trip turns into a romantic getaway for the two young men, who relish their last few days together by having sex and partying with a group of vibrant intellectuals they meet at a reading. When Elio returns to B., he’s devastated to have said goodbye to Oliver, but he tries to “neutralize” this pain by “anticipating” it. Sensing this, his father—who has picked up on his feelings for Oliver—advises him to embrace the emotional pain. “To feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!” he says.

Over the next twenty years, Elio thinks only periodically of Oliver. When Oliver and his wife and kids visit Elio’s parents in Italy for Christmas one year, his mother calls him and puts Oliver on the phone. After only a moment, Oliver starts crying and hands the phone to Elio’s mother, and Elio’s surprised to find that he too is choked up. On another occasion, Elio visits the New England college town where Oliver teaches. Oliver insists that he come over for dinner, but Elio says he can’t—it’s too emotionally painful. Instead, they go for a drink at Elio’s hotel and discuss their past, both of them revealing that their relationship remains the most important love they’ve ever had. During yet another encounter, Oliver visits Italy and Elio takes him on a tour of the house, guiding him past the orle of paradise and other spots that remain the same. “I’m like you,” Oliver says at one point. “I remember everything.” Hearing this, Elio pauses and thinks that if Oliver truly remembers everything, then he should turn to him the next day before closing the taxi door and leaving, look him in the eye, and call him by his own name.

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Connect with us, review of the movie call me by your name : a critical essay, by maya cruz.

Call Me By Your Name is an extraordinary story showcasing genuine romance: fleeting and pure. The story brings the spontaneous essence of love to the light, despite unfavorable circumstances.

The captivatingly beautiful novel-turned-film, Call Me By Your Name , dares to toy with the idea of pure, boundless, consuming romance despite unfavorable odds. Recently more than ever before, people have come together to fight for love, leaving behind the dated ideals of heteronormative relationships. In fact, Call Me By Your Name fights for so much beyond destroying the stigma around homosexuality. Between summer days, swimming at the secluded lake and getting lost in books, peach trees and bike bells, Oliver and Elio’s story encapsulates the true and fleeting essence of love that dominates the ill hand they were dealt. 

This expression of passionate, intimate love governs the story, leaving the aspects of their circumstances that would be considered problematic, controversial, or repentant left in dust. As the story was set in the 1980s, the aura of disgrace surrounding homosexuality was far more common. For a long time, there was a widespread belief that there was shame in same-sex love, or that it was unnatural and against God’s will. With Oliver and Elio’s budding relationship evolving to a strong admiration, Oliver is put on edge. Oliver was resistant at first, as he says they “haven’t done anything to be ashamed of” and they “can’t talk about those kinds of things.” Same-sex attraction wasn’t the only underlying idea of controversy in Oliver and Elio’s relationship. With the seven-year age difference between the men, Elio being 17 and Oliver 24, it could be viewed as a pedophelic relationship. Some may argue that the story puts a “stamp of approval” on pedophilia, masking it with the beauty of the story. With gender and age confining their relationship, Oliver and Elio also live far from each other. Nothing other than the summer of 1983 ties them together. 

What makes the story so overwhelmingly genuine and beautiful is that despite everything, they were in love. They overcame the stigma around gayness because when their feelings intensified, they had no choice. The story paints Oliver and Elio amidst a deeply genuine and rare romance, as well as proving that love is simply love. While it can be argued that Elio is a minor and Oliver is too old for him, pedophiles are also known as sexual predators; it is apparent in the story that in no way is Oliver preying on Elio, exclusively attracted to children, or fetishizing his adolescence. Instead, their romance buds from a place of observation, or even contemplation. It first came off as condescending, jealous, slightly trivial. However, their fondness for each other overpowers adversities in their situation in the eye of society. Their ephemeral love follows no rules. It is pure and vivid, uncaring of whether their ages or genders align, if they live near to each other, if they would be thought of as shameful, if what they wanted could fit under a label. It just was; they just loved, untouched, once there was a release of all margins. 

The story of Oliver and Elio is the birth of everything people may have said no to before. The captivating composition of the plot allows for the beauty of love to overcome everything else. It shows them as doing everything society would have labeled as wrong, yet still being absolutely pure, amidst an inexplicable experience. 

My idea for this piece came when I was rewatching the Call Me By Your Name film. I love it for everything it is, and I felt that what it stands for is something I am passionate enough to write about. I love the purity of the story, how unwaveringly true it felt, and the impeccable way it captivated that fleeting sense of romance. The rawness of the chemistry had my heart gripped, and I felt like writing about what made me feel so intensely, as well as speak of all it represents, would be something that I’d really love to do. I wrote this all in one sitting on a Sunday morning, sort of engrossed with the story, and essence of the summer it portrayed. I took a break from it for a little while, to let my words sit and to let my brain rest. I let a couple family members read or edit it, and I walked it through a Critical Essay Rubric. At first, I doubted my writing, and wasn’t proud of it. However, over some time, I grew to appreciate it because of the joy I got from writing it.

Maya Cruz is a New York City born and raised daughter, sister, and student. She has a burning passion for the arts and the overlap they have with the natural world. Writing especially has helped her evolve her perspective, which she hopes to continue sharing.

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Film Analysis — Call Me By Your Name

Call Me by Your Name

• Categories: Film Analysis

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Words: 512 |

Published: Dec 18, 2018

Words: 512 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Aciman, A. (2007). Call Me By Your Name. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Guadagnino, L. (Director). (2017). Call Me By Your Name [Motion Picture]. Frenesy Film Company.
• Ehrlich, D. (2017). "Call Me by Your Name Review." IndieWire. Retrieved from https://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/call-me-by-your-name-review-luca-guadagnino-1201778129/
• Gleiberman, O. (2017). "Film Review: 'Call Me By Your Name'." Variety. Retrieved from https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/call-me-by-your-name-review-1201963392/
• Chang, J. (2017). "Review: Call Me By Your Name." The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/movies/call-me-by-your-name-review-armie-hammer.html
• Nashawaty, C. (2017). "Call Me By Your Name is a sensuous, sun-soaked movie masterpiece." Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved from https://ew.com/movies/2017/11/22/call-me-by-your-name-ew-review/
• Breen, L. (2019). "The Sartorial Storytelling of Call Me By Your Name." AnOther Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/11420/the-sartorial-storytelling-of-call-me-by-your-name
• Murphy, M. (2018). "The Music of Call Me By Your Name." Den of Geek. Retrieved from https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-music-of-call-me-by-your-name/
• Carucci, J. (2018). "The Fashion and Style of Call Me By Your Name." Vogue. Retrieved from https://www.vogue.com/article/call-me-by-your-name-fashion
• Simek, P. (2018). "Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom on the Making of Call Me By Your Name." Texas Monthly. Retrieved from

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The Empty, Sanitized Intimacy of “Call Me by Your Name”

Luca Guadagnino’s new film, “Call Me by Your Name,” may be progressive in its appropriately admiring depiction of a loving and erotic relationship between two young men, but its storytelling is backward. It is well known, and therefore no spoiler to say, that it’s a story, set in 1983, about a summer fling between a graduate student named Oliver (Armie Hammer), who’s in his mid-twenties, and Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the seventeen-year-old son of the professor with whom Oliver is working and at whose lavish estate in northern Italy he’s staying. Half a year after their brief relationship, Oliver and Elio speak, seemingly for the first time in many months. Elio affirms that his parents were aware of the relationship and offered their approval, to which Oliver responds, “You’re so lucky; my father would have carted me off to a correctional facility.” And that’s the premise of the film: in order to have anything like a happy adolescence and avoid the sexual repression and frustration that seem to be the common lot, it’s essential to pick the right parents. The movie is about, to put it plainly, being raised right.

If Guadagnino had any real interest in his characters, what Elio and Oliver say about their parents near the end of the movie would have been among the many confidences that they share throughout. Long before the two become lovers, they’re friends—somewhat wary friends, who try to express their desire but, in the meantime, spend lots of time together eating meals and taking strolls, on bike rides and errands—and the story is inconceivable without the conversation that they’d have had as their relationship developed. And yet, as the movie is made, what they actually say to each other is hardly seen or heard.

They’re both intellectuals. Oliver is an archeologist and a classicist with formidable philological skills and philosophical training; he reads Stendhal for fun, Heraclitus for work, and writes about Heidegger. Elio, who’s trilingual (in English, French, and Italian), is a music prodigy who transcribes by ear music by Schoenberg and improvises, at the piano, a Liszt-like arrangement of a piece by Bach and a Busoni-like arrangement of the Liszt-like arrangement, and he’s literature-smitten as well. But for Guadagnino it’s enough for both of them to post their intellectual bona fides on the screen like diplomas. The script (written by James Ivory) treats their intelligence like a club membership, their learning like membership cards, their intellectualism like a password—and, above all, their experience like baggage that’s checked at the door.

What their romantic lives have been like prior to their meeting, they never say. Is Oliver the first man with whom Elio has had an intimate relationship? Has Elio been able to acknowledge, even to himself, his attraction to other men, or is the awakening of desire for a male a new experience for him? What about for Oliver? Though Elio and Oliver are also involved with women in the course of the summer, they don’t ever discuss their erotic histories, their desires, their inhibitions, their hesitations, their joys, their heartbreaks. They’re the most tacit of friends and the most silent of lovers—or, rather, in all likelihood they’re voluble and free-spoken, as intellectually and personally and verbally intimate as they are physically intimate, as passionate about their love lives as about the intellectual fires that drive them onward—but the movie doesn’t show them sharing these things. Guadagnino can’t be bothered to imagine (or to urge Ivory to imagine) what they might actually talk about while sitting together alone. Scenes deliver some useful information to push the plot ahead and then cut out just as they get rolling, because Guadagnino displays no interest in the characters, only in the story.

For that matter, Guadagnino offers almost nothing of Elio’s parents’ talk about whatever might be going on with their son and Oliver. Not that the parents (played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) are absentee—they’re present throughout, and there are even scenes featuring them apart from both Elio and Oliver, talking politics and movies with friends, but there isn’t a scene of them discussing their son’s relationship. They don’t express anything about it at all, whether approval or fear or even practical concern regarding the reactions of the neighbors. The characters of “Call Me by Your Name” are reduced to animated ciphers, as if Guadagnino feared that detailed practical discussions, or displays of freedom of thought and action, might dispel the air of romantic mystery and silent passion that he conjures in lieu of relationships. The elision of the characters’ mental lives renders “Call Me by Your Name” thin and empty, renders it sluggish; the languid pace of physical action is matched by the languid pace of ideas, and the result is an enervating emptiness.

There are two other characters whose near-total silence and self-effacement is a mark of Guadagnino’s blinkered and sanitized point of view—two domestic employees, the middle-aged cook and maid Mafalda (Vanda Capriolo) and the elderly groundskeeper and handyman Anchise (Antonio Rimoldi), who work for Elio’s family, the Perlmans. What do they think, and what do they say? They’re working for a Jewish family—the Perlmans, Elio tells Oliver (who’s also Jewish), are the only Jewish family in the region, even the only Jewish family ever to have set foot in the village—and they observe a brewing bond between Elio and Oliver. Do they care at all? Does the acceptance of this homosexual relationship exist in a bubble within the realm of intellectuals, and does that tolerance depend upon the silencing of the working class? Is there any prejudice anywhere in the area where the story takes place?

The one hint that there might be any at all comes in a brief scene of Elio and Oliver sharing a furtive caress in a shadowed arcade, when they brush hands and Oliver says, “I would kiss you if I could.” (That pregnant line, typically, ends the scene.) Even there, where the setting—the sight lines between the town at large and the character’s standpoint—is of dramatic significance, Guadagnino has no interest in showing a broad view of the location, because of his bland sensibility and flimsy directorial strategy, because of his relentless delivery of images that have the superficial charm of picture postcards. Adding a reverse angle or a broad pan shot on a setting is something that Guadagnino can’t be bothered with, because it would subordinate the scene’s narrow evocations to complexities that risk puncturing the mood just as surely as any substantive discussion might do.

To be sure, there’s much that a good movie can offer beside smart talk and deep confidences; for that matter, the development of characters is a grossly overrated quality in movies, and some of the best directors often do little of it. There’s also a realm of symbol, of gesture, of ideas, of emotions that arise from careful attention to images or a brusque gestural energy; that’s where Guadagnino plants the movie, and that’s where the superficiality of his artistry emerges all the more clearly. He has no sense of positioning, of composition, of rhythm, but he’s not free with his camera, either; his actors are more or less in a constant proscenium of a frame that displays their action without offering a point of view.

The intimacy of Elio and Oliver is matched by very little cinematic intimacy. There are a few brief images of bodies intertwined, some just-offscreen or cannily framed sex, but no real proximity, almost no closeups, no tactile sense, no point of view of either character toward the other. Guadagnino rarely lets himself get close to the characters, because he seems to wish never to lose sight of the expensive architecture, the lavish furnishings, the travelogue locations, the manicured lighting, the accoutrements that fabricate the sense of “ order and beauty, luxury, calm, and sensuality .” All that’s missing is the Web site offering Elio-and-Oliver tours through the Italian countryside, with a stopover at the Perlman villa. Instead of gestural or pictorial evocations of intimacy, the performers act out the script’s emotions with a bland literalness that—due to the mechanistic yet vague direction—is often laughable, as in the case of the pseudo-James Dean-like grimacing that Guadagnino coaxes from Chalamet. Even the celebrated awkward dance that Oliver performs at an outdoor night spot was more exhilarating when performed to a Romanian song by an anonymous young man at a computer screen. Hammer is game, playful, and openhearted, but the scene as filmed is calculatedly cute and disingenuous. (Such faults in performance fall upon directors, not because they pull puppet strings but because they create the environment and offer the guidance from which the performances result, and then they choose what stays in the movie.)

There are moments of tenderness—telegraphed from miles away but nonetheless moving, as when Oliver grasps Elio’s bare shoulder and then makes light of it, when he reaches out to touch Elio’s hand, when Elio slides his bare foot over Oliver’s—that are simply and bittersweetly affecting. They’re in keeping with the story of a love affair of mutual discovery that is sheltered from social circumstances, from prejudice, from hostility, from side-eyes or religious dogma—and that nevertheless involves heartbreak. It’s a story about romantic melancholy and a sense of loss as a crucial element of maturation and self-discovery, alongside erotic exploration, fulfillment, and first love. The idea of the film is earnest, substantial, moving, and quite beautiful—in its idea, its motivation, its motivating principle. It offers, in theory, a sort of melancholy romantic realism. But, as rendered by Guadagnino, it remains at the level of a premise, a pitch, an index card.

Near the end of the film, Professor Perlman delivers a monologue to Elio that concentrates the movie’s sap of intellectualized understanding and empathy into a rich and potent Oscar syrup. The speech is moving and wise; Stuhlbarg’s delivery of it, in inflection and gesture, is finely burnished. Here, Guadagnino’s direction is momentarily incisive, in a way that it has not been throughout the film, perhaps because the professor’s academicized liberalism toward matters of sex is the one thing that truly excites the director. The entire film is backloaded—and it’s nearly emptied out in order for him to lay his cards, finally, on the table.

Call Me By Your Name

48 pages • 1 hour read

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Genre Context: Romance

Call Me By Your Name is a novel within the romance genre , in which the central conflict and motivator of the plot is love. Call Me By Your Name both uses some romance genre tropes while subverting other elements. In the romance genre, narratives focus on one character as the central protagonist as they navigate the joys and turbulences of romantic relationships. In this novel, Elio is the hero whose perspective informs the reader’s understanding of romance. The conflict of the novel is driven by conflicts of romance: whether Oliver likes Elio in return, whether their lovemaking will change their relationship, and whether their love can stand the test of time.

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• Hersh Goldberg-Polin

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At the Jerusalem synagogue where Hersh Goldberg-Polin danced in life, grief and anger reign after his death

JERUSALEM — Three hundred and thirty-two days after Hersh Goldberg-Polin danced in the courtyard next to his Jerusalem synagogue on the holiday of Simchat Torah, more than a thousand people gathered there in grief and prayer to mourn his murder by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

During the Sunday night vigil, the courtyard railings were lined with oversized yellow ribbons to symbolize advocacy for the hostages, Hapoel Jerusalem soccer flags — the 23-year-old’s favorite team — and posters that read, “We love you, stay strong, survive,” a mantra coined by his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin.

Just hours earlier, one of the posters had been hanging over the balcony of the home of Shira Ben-Sasson, a leader of Hakhel, the Goldberg-Polins’ egalitarian congregation in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem.

“We were sure we would take it down when he came home,” Ben-Sasson said.

The community wanted to unite while respecting the Goldberg-Polins’ desire for privacy, she said, prompting them to organize the prayer gathering.

“But it’s like a Band-Aid or giving first aid, it’s what you do in an emergency. I don’t know how we go on after this,” she said.

A covered courtyard at the Hakhel congregation was filled with mourners the day after Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose family are prominent members, was found to have been killed in Gaza. Hundreds of other people crowded outside the gates, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)

She added that the community, which has a large contingent of English-speaking immigrants, was not prepared for the High Holidays, which begin in about a month. She said, “Seeing his empty seat is hard.”

For Ben-Sasson, who wore a T-shirt bearing the Talmudic dictum “There is no greater mitzvah than the redeeming of captives,” the tragedy is especially painful because, she said, it could have been avoided with a ceasefire agreement that freed hostages.

“Hersh was alive 48 hours ago. We think a deal could have saved him. There is no military solution to this,” she said.

That feeling of bereavement, often mixed with betrayal, pervaded gatherings across Israel on Sunday, as the country struggled with the news that six hostages who may have been freed in an agreement were now dead as negotiations continue to stall. Speakers at protests in Tel Aviv blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who himself apologized for not getting the hostages out alive but blamed Hamas for obstructing a deal. The country’s labor union, the Histadrut, has called a national strike on Monday to demand a deal.

A rare early September rain lashed parts of Israel on Sunday, leading to a widespread interpretation: God, too, was weeping.

Some at the Jerusalem gathering, including the relative of another former hostage, said Netanyahu had chosen defeating Hamas over freeing the captives.

Josef Avi Yair Engel’s grandson Ofir was released from Hamas captivity in November. He paid tribute to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, murdered in captivity, in Jerusalem, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)

Josef Avi Yair Engel, whose grandson Ofir, 18, was released from Hamas captivity in November during that month’s ceasefire deal, expressed shock over Hersh’s murder but said he was not surprised, given the wartime policies of Netanyahu’s government.

“We knew months ago this was going to happen. Bibi’s formula, to dismantle Hamas and return the hostages, wasn’t logical. It’s an either/or situation,” Engel said, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “He’s tearing the country apart. I’m afraid that in the coming months there won’t be a state at all.”

Engel said he felt a close bond with Hersh’s father Jon Polin, not only because of their joint activism in the hostage families’ tent outside the Prime Minister’s Residence, but also because of their shared identity as Jerusalemites.

“There aren’t many of us in the hostage circle,” he said. “We’re like family.”

Sarah Mann, who did not know the family personally, said the weekend’s tragedy reminded her of Oct. 7.

“This day has sparks of the seventh, which created numbness and an inability to talk. Just complete shock,” she said.

Mourners left notes at a gathering at Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s family synagogue in Jerusalem. Many of the messages used the Hebrew word for “sorry.” (Deborah Danan)

Part of the reason for that, Mann said, was Rachel, who she described as a “force of faith.” Goldberg-Polin’s mother emerged as the most prominent advocate for the hostages globally and became a symbol in her own right as she crisscrossed the world calling for her son’s freedom.

“Millions of people around the world held onto her. Once that was cut, people’s ability to hold onto faith was knocked out today. But even though this has shattered us, we need to keep holding onto God,” Mann said.

For Susi Döring Preston, the day called to mind was not Oct. 7 but Yom Kippur, and its communal solemnity.

She said she usually steers clear of similar war-related events because they are too overwhelming for her.

“Before I avoided stuff like this because I guess I still had hope. But now is the time to just give in to needing to be around people because you can’t hold your own self up any more,” she said, tears rolling down her face. “You need to feel the humanity and hang onto that.”

Like so many others, Döring Preston paid tribute to the Goldberg-Polins’ tireless activism. “They needed everyone else’s strength but we drew so much strength from them and their efforts, “she said. “You felt it could change the outcome. But war is more evil than good. I think that’s the crushing thing. You can do everything right, but the outcome is still devastating.”

Guy Gordon, with his daughter Maya, added a broken heart to the piece of tape he has worn daily to mark the number of days since the hostage crisis began, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)

Guy Gordon, a member of Hakhel who moved to Israel from Dublin, Ireland, in the mid-1990s, said the efforts towards ensuring Hersh’s safe return have been an anchor for the community during the war. The community knew him as the family described him in its announcement of his funeral on Tuesday, as “a child of light, love and peace” who enjoyed exploring the world and coming home to his family, including his parents and younger sisters, Leebie and Orly.

“It gave us something to hope for, and pray for and to demonstrate for,” he said. “We had no choice but to be unreasonably optimistic. Tragically it transpired that he survived until the very end.”

Gordon, like many others in the crowd, wore a piece of duct tape marked with the number of days since Oct. 7 — a gesture initiated by Goldberg-Polin’s mother. Unlike on previous days, though, his tape also featured a broken red heart beside the number.

Nadia Levene, a family friend, also reflected on the improbability of Hersh’s survival.

“He did exactly what his parents begged him to do. He was strong. He did survive. And look what happened,” Levene said.

She hailed Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s “unwavering strength and belief in God,” adding, “There were times I lost faith. I suppose I was angry with God. But she just kept inspiring us all to pray, pray, pray.”

Leah Silver of Jerusalem examined stickers showing Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s mantra for her son Hersh, who was murdered in captivity in Gaza, at a gathering after Hersh’s death, Sept. 1, 2024. (Deborah Danan)

Jerusalem resident Leah Silver rejected politicizing the hostages’ deaths.

“Everything turns political so quickly. I came here because I felt that before all the protests, we need to just mourn for a moment and to pray. And show respect for each other,” she said. “We’ve become confused about who the enemy is. It’s very sad.”

But not everyone at the gathering joined in to sing Israel’s national anthem at the closing of the prayer gathering.

“I’m sorry, I can’t sing ‘Hatikvah,'” Reza Green, a Baka resident who did not know the Goldberg-Polins personally, said. “I’m too angry. We shouldn’t be here.”

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