What’s Wrong with “Call Me By Your Name” (and how it could have been fixed)
I really wanted to love this film, and some parts of it I did. Perfectly trilingual Timothée Chalamet alone is worth the price of admission, and who doesn’t want to look at Armie Hammer for two hours, not to mention sumptuous Northern Italy in the summer? The dialogue was intelligent and the story itself rare to find on screen, especially treated without sensationalism or prurience. So let me be clear; I absolutely recommend this movie. Unfortunately, there were just too many moments in the script I simply didn’t believe, and for good reason.
This story, quite specifically. is very familiar territory for me personally. In 1975, when I was 17, my very liberal New York parents sent me to France for my last year of high school, in the Mediterranean region my mother is from. (She wanted me to be immersed in French at an age where I would learn it flawlessly– the younger the better.) They had no idea I was already a sexual active young gay man who’d been sneaking into the bars of Manhattan all through his junior year of high school. (I was, in fact, far more advanced than young Elio Perlman, the protagonist of Call Me…) I was supposed to live in a dorm with farmer boys who boarded at school during the week, but finagled instead becoming roommates with some cousins’ cousins in our own apartment in the center of…
