Cinema and Love: How does ‘Call Me By Your Name’ capture it?

Questions of love permeate so much of cinema. What is love? What does it do to you? How should one feel when in love? For me, there is yet to be an answer to these questions that matches what is presented in Call Me By Your Name (2017).

Whilst all things and even nature generally reflect the romance of this film’s protagonists, there is something to water specifically that guides their romance. It is in the ocean that the two first really connect. As Oliver reveals his inner fragility to Elio he immediately rolls into a pool. It is at a fountain that Elio professes his feelings. Indeed they first kiss on a riverbank. However, there is one moment that displays this like no other. As Oliver contemplates acting on his feelings for Elio he sits on the edge of a pool one foot in the water, one not. The staging of this is perfect; his split mind represented in the two feet committed to opposing mediums (wetness and dryness).

Love’s effect on us and its duration are unknowable; it is mystical, much like an ocean hiding long lost classical sculptures

Water doesn’t just provide a framework for Elio and Oliver’s love, but serves as an allegory for all love. Love, much like water, is eternal. Love’s effect on us and its duration are unknowable; it is mystical, much like an ocean hiding long lost classical sculptures. More than that, love and water possess the same silent power; sometimes serene and tender like calm open seas and sometimes intense and powerful like a raging storm. It is telling that at his most pained moment, as the film ends, Elio stares into a fire, the polar opposite of water. There is something to water, in its everlasting quiet intensity, that allows it to commune on the ineffable level usually reserved for romance.

Love as water, water as love, is a concept not unique to Luca Guadagnino. It’s disseminated across a multitude of media, from the music of The National or Sufjan Stevens (who made music for this film), to writers like Virginia Woolf. Call Me By Your Name not only highlights this connection, but does so on an aesthetic level so beautiful and compelling words don’t really do it justice.

It’s no coincidence that on Oliver’s last night Elio chooses to get drunk, mirroring in an emotional sense a powerful narcotic with love

Indeed Love for Guadagnino is truly potent and touches every aspect of those who feel it. You can’t ignore the influence of the first line in representing this: “le saboteur”, French for saboteur, which on a direct level, references how Oliver will sabotage Elio by taking his room. More importantly, though it is a foreshadowing of how Oliver, and the love Elio and him share, will sabotage what was Elio’s life, radically and irreversibly changing it. It’s no coincidence that on Oliver’s last night Elio chooses to get drunk, mirroring in an emotional sense a powerful narcotic with love. He feels the withdrawal symptoms of this much more powerful drug the next day as Oliver leaves.

More than that, it is a force to which one submits oneself absolutely and completely. This is what is extolled in the film’s title and by the fact that throughout the film the two characters adopt their counterparts name. During the film, the characters begin to share clothes and even their personalities begin to resemble one another’s. Elio even begins wearing a necklace identical to one worn by Oliver. The love Elio and Oliver share bonds them on such a level, they lose individuality, and become an inseparable body. This is why, in the end, Elio is so distraught in losing Oliver that, in a way, he has lost a part of himself.

So much of this comes through in the film’s music. Concepts of nostalgia, classicism and losing oneself to love dominate the lyrics of Sufjan Steven’s songs, whereby the music’s ethereal feel matches the film tonally. This is what elevates Sufjan Steven’s music for the film from simply good, to sublime.

Timothée Chalamet’s in particular encapsulates first love beautifully; never exaggerated or clichéd, but always real

Their romance speaks to you not only because it encapsulates these beautiful truths of love, but because it always feels achingly real. Part of this comes from an immense ensemble cast performance. Every character has their own immense depth, as unique as it is engrossing. Timothée Chalamet’s in particular encapsulates first love beautifully; never exaggerated or clichéd, but always real.

There is more to it than that though. In filming, only a 35mm camera lens was used roughly mimicking the feel of human eyesight. Cameras follow action casually in the way an observer might. Throughout, long takes and a lack of cuts in the film make it feel all the more real. When cuts do occur, they are sudden, and represent seemingly random amounts of time, from a second to a week. Conventional, and often rather artificial, concepts of storytelling centering around three act plots are abandoned in favour of something resembling the chaos of nostalgic memory.

With no enforced framework on the storytelling, Elio’s intense passion comes to drive the plot. Long takes aren’t done for some pompous stylized reason, but simply to give an authentic and beautiful window into the character’s environment. That is why the depth of field is always so deep and zooms are rare. Guadagnino wants to make sure the charged romantic environment and space between the characters is never out of view. Whilst he values realism here, it is never at the expense of beauty.

 What makes the cinematography paradoxically brilliant, is that it perfectly manages to negate its own existence. You don’t feel like you’re watching a film – you’re a fellow passenger on Elio and Oliver’s romantic journey, and suffer every exciting, passionate and tragic moment of it. All the longing and desire, all the pain and emptiness, all of this tender romance, makes every audience member painfully nostalgic for Italian summers they never had.

Much like the classical sculptures that engross Oliver, this film’s simple realism is tinted with a touch of the surreal in its ethereal beauty and occasionally abstract portrayals of love. Like love itself, this film is a beautiful, mystical, and intoxicating paradox.