The hours move slowly in “Call Me By Your Name.”
It’s summertime in Northern Italy in 1983 on a secluded 17th century villa, where life among the antiquities is beautifully tranquil and nothing is ever pressing. There is time to read the paper in the morning, while delicately picking at a soft-boiled egg. There is time to dally around with the locals at the lake for endless stretches or pop into a card game while in town “running errands.” Shirts are optional, shoes are, too; bathing suits are a wardrobe staple and naps are a way of life. No one is ever making grocery runs or stressing about what to have for dinner (that’s the cook’s job). Even the flies are serene.
This is life for a precocious 17-year-old, Elio (Timoth?e Chalamet), his Greco-Roman professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) and translator mother (Amira Casar) in Luca Guadagnino’s unabashedly beautiful and subtly powerful adaptation of Andre Aciman’s novel of first love and burgeoning sexuality. His father has enlisted, as he always does, a research assistant for the summer. This year’s model is Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American graduate student who is comically sculpted and handsome, preternaturally confident and disarmingly intelligent.
Oliver doesn’t look 24. He looks like a grown man, which makes Elio, whose skinny, stretched frame can barely fill out his denim shorts and polo shirts, look even younger.
The physical incongruities only highlight the rift in emotional maturity between Elio and Oliver, whose flirtation intensifies from imperceptible to full flung over the course of Oliver’s time with the Perlman family. Oliver teases, Elio resists, and the desire eventually manifests itself into a beautiful and tastefully sensual physical relationship.