Warning: spoilers ahead.
The night before I saw Call Me By Your Name at Sundance in January, I was at a party chatting with another writer and his colleague. I mentioned how excited I was to see Luca Guadagnino's latest film, as I had loved the novel on which it's based. My friend, also gay, expressed his own excitement for the movie; his straight colleague, however, knew nothing about it, and asked us to explain what it was about.
Perhaps it was the free whiskey, but my excitement was too obvious. "It's amazing!" I said. "Its every gay boy's fantasy: a handsome older college student comes to stay with this 17-year-old's family for the summer in Italy, they basically have insatiable chemistry, they fuck—I mean, they fuck—and fall in love and it's beautiful and sun-kissed and gorgeous. And then it all falls apart when the college student leaves at the end of the summer, rendering the younger boy an emotional wreck!"
I reiterated the drama of the last line: "It's the kind of romance most young gay men don't get to have until they're in their mid-twenties, when they're all stupid and horny and self-absorbed. It's unreal, yet so believable and tragic." (I may have also described it, "Like 'Strawberry Wine,' only gayer!")
My synopsis, however, focuses on the story's more salacious details and undermines the point of the book: an immersive, intense love affair between two young men that feels so outside the so-called genre of queer literature. The author, Andre Aciman, is straight; maybe that's why the usual trappings of a queer story aren't there. There are no gay-bashings, no AIDS scares, no angry parents reinforcing a sense of shame around the notion of two boys falling in love (and even worse: fucking each other). It's pure love story. That it's also a period piece (the book takes place in 1987, the film in 1983) makes it even more fantastical. Yet the love story is so fully realized, so intimate, that I was able to look past those narrative glitches and appreciate it for what it is: a beautiful, touching, emotional romance.
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The queer subtleties reveal themselves once Oliver, played by Armie Hammer in the film, leaves Elio, played by Timothée Chalamet, to return to America and continue his studies. A distraught Elio, suddenly alone, cannot process his broken heart. There's no one to console him in the near-empty train station, and there's no one else he can confide in. He did, after all, spend the summer having a presumably illicit affair with another man. He cannot tell his parents, his friend, his girlfriend. He's lonely, in every sense of the word, and the loneliest part of being a young queer person is the feeling that you cannot tell those closest to you about experiencing love—and the inevitable pain that results from it—for the first time.
I experienced a similar heartbreak when I went through an early breakup, although I did have close friends who let me cry on their couch without asking for details (but who were ready to listen when I was able to express my sadness with words). I didn't have my parents, because I hadn't come out to them. I'd have to first get over the giant wall between us; I'd have to admit to them that I was gay, which was already unfathomable. How would I then immediately be able to tell these people—whom I loved dearly, but from whom I was hiding a deeply important part of my life—that not only was I gay, but I had fallen in love with someone, someone I didn't think I'd be able to continue to love?
As I sat in the dark theatre in Park City as the film's final moments appeared on the screen, softly crying along with my neighbours, I suddenly remembered the book's climactic moment between Elio and his father, Mr. Perlman, that leaves audiences feeling warm and optimistic. The film ends with an exchange between actors Timothée Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg, in which the latter delivers a touching monologue that attempts to soften the emotional blow his character's son is experiencing. Here is a passage from Aciman's novel, which closely resembles the version in James Ivory's screenplay:
You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. 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!
That's where I absolutely lost it, feeling overwhelmed by emotion not just because I could relate to Elio's heartbreak, but because I suddenly realised that was the sort of thing I always wanted to hear from my own father. I never got it. I came out to my parents via email (foolishly, in hindsight). My father was in his last months of pancreatic cancer, and I felt like it was a now-or-never situation—something I had to do no matter how much it scared me. Yet I avoided showing my vulnerabilities (and, likely, so did he) by never talking about it. I'd visit in those last months, trying to keep things as stress-free as possible, and not wanting to broach a heavy subject.
Avoiding it remains one of my few regrets—mostly because I was assuming the worst: that my father didn't want to talk about it, either, because he, too, was ashamed. Months later, after he died, my mother told me that they of course had conversations in which my father expressed the opposite—that he loved me and cared for me no matter what. I wish I had heard it from him. I wish I had been brave enough to let him tell me those words himself.
Stuhlbarg's final monologue reminded me of that personal moment, a moment I never got to experience on my own—just as Elio and Oliver's idyllic, Italian romance is so extraordinary to me. Yet one of the reasons I adore Call Me By Your Name so much (both the book and the film) are those emotional leaps that require just the slightest suspension of disbelief. Cinema can often offer us what we cannot find on our own in our real lives. In the case of Call Me By Your Name, it went beyond portraying a similar experience to my own (a gay man falling in and out of love); it showed me—a 34-year-old gay man—something missing from my own life, the conversation between my father and me. It lifted a burden I didn't realise I'd been carrying for years. I can only imagine how it must amplify a similar sense of empowerment in a younger viewer who also needs so desperately to hear the words of acceptance he's longing to find at home.
