call me by your name book essay

Call Me By Your Name

By andre aciman.

• Call Me By Your Name Summary

Call Me By Your Name details the love story of Elio and Oliver , two young men who spend a summer together on the Italian Riviera and develop a bond that shapes their view of love for the rest of their lives. Elio is a precocious 17-year-old who spends summers with his family in their villa on the Italian Riviera. Oliver is a brilliant and handsome 24-year-old post-doctoral scholar from America who spends a summer in the mid-1980s at Elio's villa. Elio's parents select Oliver to live with them for six weeks as part of an annual fellowship that they offer to young scholars, with the purpose of helping them revise a manuscript for publication and aiding Elio's father —who is himself an academic—with his paperwork. Call Me By Your Name is a story about obsessive love, the passage of time, and life-defining memories.

The novel is told through Elio's first-person narration, recounting his memories of Oliver and their subsequent relationship. The novel begins with his first memories of Oliver: Oliver's typical farewell, "Later!", which Elio finds strange, cold, and indifferent. In his first few weeks at the villa, Oliver charms and befriends the residents and neighbors of the villa. Elio, who is introverted and shy, reflects on the beginning of his infatuation with Oliver, analyzing all of Oliver's words and mannerisms as he secretly pines for a more intimate relationship with Oliver. The desire that Elio feels for Oliver is at once overwhelming and sublime, a feeling stronger than any he has felt before, but he finds himself unable to express his feelings or talk about them with anyone, for fear of shame and rejection. Oliver's apparent coldness and indifference pain Elio, who labors to conceal his feelings from Oliver with affected silence and indifference on his part.

Elio and Oliver find common interests in literature, music, philosophy, and exercise; a friendship blooms between them. Elio admires Oliver's confidence and self-possessed attitude, taking note of how "okay" he seems with many things in his life, including criticism, his vices, his relationships, and his identity as a Jewish man. The latter makes a strong impression on Elio, whose family is also Jewish but who makes a point of keeping quiet about it in a majority Catholic country. Oliver's confidence on this matter emboldens Elio and makes him feel that Oliver could be his soulmate.

In the days leading up to Elio's confession of his attraction, Oliver begins seeing a neighbor of Elio's named Chiara . The two share a number of 'citte': dates, crushes, and mini-infatuations. Elio reflects on his attraction to both Oliver and Chiara and looks for signs that their relationship is sexual, both to his excitement and frustration. When he attempts to talk to Oliver about Chiara, seemingly in favor of their relationship and trying to set them up, Oliver shuts him down, declaring later that he is not interested in her. At the same time, Elio's parents beg him to spend more time with friends and enjoy his youth; trying to get his mind off of his desire for Oliver, he begins spending time with a girl his age, Marzia . Elio and Marzia's dates are sexual but not romantic, and Marzia keeps a wary emotional distance from Elio, seeing through his niceties to know that he is not actually interested in her.

On a trip to the nearby town of B., Elio alludes to his desire for Oliver, and Oliver tells him that they shouldn't talk about such things. Elio invites him to his secret solitary spot where he comes to read, the same berm where Monet used to paint. Oliver kisses Elio to appease his desire, but he wishes not to go any further for fear of doing anything that would make them feel ashamed. Elio has a hard time reading Oliver's intentions, but Oliver conceals his own desire for Elio out of shyness and fear of getting his own emotions entangled. The following weeks are witness to much silence and avoidance between the pair, until Elio decides to break their silence. Oliver invites him to his room at midnight and the two make love, after which Oliver holds Elio's gaze and asks him to call him by his name. After their night together, Elio feels confusion and frustration, unsure where his relationship with Oliver stands or where it is going, but Oliver warms up to him and a romance blossoms.

As Oliver's fellowship comes to an end, he and Elio take a trip to Rome where Oliver will spend his last three days in Italy. There, they spend a romantic vacation, spending one night with a group of revelers at a book-release party. The celebrated poet makes a speech about the nature of desire as a universal human experience. Elio becomes too intoxicated and vomits in a square; Oliver helps him recuperate, and they sing Neapolitan songs with strangers on a street. Elio's memory of kissing Oliver on the square becomes his favorite memory of Oliver for the rest of his life.

Oliver returns to the United States and Elio returns to his villa. Before departing, Oliver leaves Elio his billowy blue shirt as a memento. They promise to stay in contact; over the phone, Oliver tells Elio that he, too, took a memento from his room: a postcard depicting Monet's berm. Elio's father reveals to him that he knew about the affair and that he approves. He tells Elio that what he had with Oliver was a special, rare occurrence, something he himself never found in his life. The next year, Oliver marries a woman and goes on to father two children. In the years that follow, Elio continues to reflect on his experience with Oliver and sees it as a fulcrum around which the other romantic experiences in his life revolve. In vague terms, he mentions that he had many relationships after Oliver, but none as memorable and life-defining as Oliver. Elio and Oliver cross paths again at a New England college where Oliver teaches, his boys now teenagers; they share drinks and reminisce.

Years after that—twenty years after the events of his summer with Elio, and after the death of Elio's father—Oliver has an overnight stay at the villa en route to another Italian city. Elio walks Oliver through the villa and they reminisce about his father. Oliver tells Elio that he is just like him—that he "remembers everything." Elio concludes the novel by wishing to tell Oliver that when he boards his taxi the following morning, if he truly is like him, he should hold his gaze and call him by his name just as he did on their first night together.

Call Me By Your Name Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for Call Me By Your Name

Call Me By Your Name study guide contains a biography of author Andre Aciman, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Call Me By Your Name
• Character List

Essays for Call Me By Your Name

Call Me By Your Name literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman.

• Elio’s Feelings Through The Form And Structure in Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman

Lesson Plan for Call Me By Your Name

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Call Me By Your Name
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Call Me By Your Name Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Call Me By Your Name

• Introduction
• Early life and education
• Out of Egypt
• Personal life

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, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Identity and Attraction

In Call Me by Your Name , André Aciman implies that romantic attraction often involves a recognition of oneself in someone else. As seventeen-year-old Elio experiences his first serious relationship, he finds himself drawn to the ways he and Oliver are the same. After all, they’re both Jewish, both interested in the life of the mind, and both attracted by similar physical features. These similarities are especially significant for Elio, since he’s in the midst…

Pain, Heartbreak, and Regret

Throughout Call Me by Your Name , Aciman presents emotional pain as valuable, inevitable, and worth experiencing. Because the circumstances of Elio and Oliver ’s relationship make it difficult for them to sustain their romance, Elio understands from the beginning that he’s destined for heartbreak. Throughout the summer, he becomes more and more infatuated with Oliver, all the while knowing that he’ll eventually leave for good. This is partially why he doesn’t pursue Oliver at…

Coming of Age and Maturity

Because Elio is such an intelligent and sophisticated narrator, it’s easy to forget that he’s too young to engage in a love affair with a twenty-four-year-old man. Elio’s assessment of his relationship with Oliver is so mature that the age difference between them often seems arbitrary or irrelevant. At the same time, though, Aciman is no doubt aware of the tension caused by the fact that Elio is a minor, something that not only adds…

Language and Communication

Aciman’s novel showcases the significance of language in fraught relational contexts. Especially in the initial stages of his relationship with Oliver , Elio desperately scrutinizes the language he and his lover use, often obsessing over how Oliver has worded a phrase or how he has handled himself in a conversation. He pays such close attention to these nuances because they provide him with the only chance he has to express his feelings. Unfortunately, though, he…

Time and Anticipation

Throughout Call Me by Your Name , anticipation is often cast as unbearable and torturous. This is because Elio doesn’t know whether or not something romantic will happen between Oliver and himself. Although there are a number of indications that they will develop a loving relationship, their future remains unclear for the entire first half of the novel. During this time, Elio is tormented by the way time moves—he knows Oliver will soon be gone…

Call Me By Your Name

48 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Pages 66-117

Part 2, Pages 117-163

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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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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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Call Me by Your Name

• Categories: Film Analysis

About this sample

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”

By Richard Brody

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.

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Call Me By Your Name, A Novel

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Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by Three-Time Oscar™ Nominee James Ivory The Basis of the Oscar-Winning Best Adapted Screenplay A New York Times Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller A Vulture Book Club Pick An Instant Classic and One of the Great Love Stories of Our Time Andre Aciman's 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’ cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Ficition A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Magazine "Future Canon" Selection • A Chicago Tribune and Seattle Times (Michael Upchurch's) Favorite Favorite Book of the Year

Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by James Ivory WINNER BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY ACADEMY AWARD Nominated for Four Oscars A New York Times Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller A Vulture Book Club Pick An Instant Classic and One of the Great Love Stories of Our Time Andre Aciman's 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' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.

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** THE GENTLEMAN FROM PERU - THE NEW NOVEL FROM ANDRE ACIMAN - IS AVAILABLE NOW** In this spellbinding new exploration of the varieties of love, the author of Call Me by Your Name lets us back into his characters' lives years after their first meeting In Find Me , Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, now a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train upends Sami's visit and changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the nuances of emotion that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the world of one of our greatest contemporary romances to show us that in fact true love never dies.

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André Aciman is an American memoirist, essayist, and New York Times bestselling novelist originally from Alexandria, Egypt. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Paris Review, Granta as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.

Aciman grew up in a multilingual and multinational family and attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1968, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he graduated in 1973 from Lehman College. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He has also taught creative writing at New York University, Cooper Union, and and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. His books and essays have been translated in many languages. In addition to Out of Egypt (1995), Aciman has published False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001) and Alibis: Essays on Elswhere (2011), and four novels, Enigma Variations (2017), Harvard Square (2013), Eight White Nights (2010) and Call Me By Your Name (2007), for which he won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited Letters of Transit (1999) and The Proust Project (2004) and prefaced Monsieur Proust (2003), The Light of New York (2007), Condé Nast Traveler's Room With a View (2010) and Stefan Zweig's Journey to the Past (2010). His novel Call Me by Your Name has been turned into a film (2017), directed by Luca Guadagnino, with a screenplay by James Ivory, and starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet.

He is currently working on his fifth novel and a collection of essays.

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