“The Usurper.” This is the first spoken line in the beautifully-made work of art that is Call Me by Your Name. I watched this movie a while back, curious to see what all arthouse cinemas were raving about and it’s fair to say the fuss is well worth it. Call Me By Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnini, is set in the Summer of 1983, ‘somewhere in Italy’ as the film adaptation puts it. It follows the story of Elio, a seventeen-year-old boy and the affection, admiration and later love that blossoms between him and his father’s summer intern, Oliver, a 24-year-old student. At first, this might sound like nothing more than your average coming of age, LGBTQ film portraying first love. Except it’s not.
While watching this movie I was hardly even made aware of either of these two themes in the film, though they are quite dominant. The writer, Andre Acimen, and his intentions of capturing a uniquely told love story shines through with emotion and, although set in the 80s, communicates the love that grows between the two characters as they try, unsuccessfully, to repress their desires towards each other. Call Me by Your Name is as much a movie about our first understanding of what love truly is – and what it consequently does to us – as it is about the coming of age story of Elio and how his experiences with Oliver shape his growth into young adulthood over the span of less than six weeks.
So what relation does this film have to us? How does it articulate the first emotions felt when falling in love with someone and how do we deal with the consequent loss of this? It tends to be true that our first love hurts the most. Here, we feel the most; everything felt being so new, exciting and terrifying at the same time. Many of us have at some point in our short lives felt both the stomach turning, head spinning effects of first love as well as the pain experienced in equal yet opposite measure at the end. After what feels like having survived a tornado, of course. The after-effect doesn’t quite taste so sweet, does it? We can all relate to this to some extent I’m sure. This is where one of the most well thought out dialogues in the movie appears, coming from Elio’s father, Mr Perlman:
“In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste.”
Looking at this, perhaps it is not so much the amount of time we spend with someone that determines their impact on us after all. But rather how we connect initially with no words needed. In my eyes, Elio and Oliver shared one of those rare connections which are hard to find again. By calling each other by the opposite’s name they seem to recognise the other, reconfirming the larger-than-life connection they have. This is what makes Call Me by Your Name the beautiful commentary on love our generation so desperately needs. That it exceeds everything else and that, above all, love is necessary for the growth we need to experience in growing up. However painful it may be.