Smart is sexy

‘Call Me by Your Name’ is a romantic, lucid dream

“Call Me by Your Name” felt familiar. Provincial Italian countryside, the mélange of ephemeral and enigmatic humanity colliding with fictional lives while informing our own all-too-real ones. That cinematic, temporal flow enveloping character and audience with a naturalism that almost feels like going on a vacation from yourself.

Then I looked up the director, Luca Gaudagnino, and realized I had seen his Tilda Swinton-starring “I Am Love,” which was on my Top 10 back in 2009. My memory for names isn’t good (at all), but Gaudagnino’s assured stylistic signature left enough of a footprint for me to make the almost decade-long connection. Whatever it was he had then, he still has it.

In “Call Me,” we meet 17-year-old introvert Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the musician son of a Jewish archeologist, Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), and Annella Perlman (Amira Casar).

Living in Italy, where Mr. Perlman is recovering ancient bronze statues from the depths of the Adriatic, the professor invites a brilliant and equally statuesque graduate student, Oliver (Armie Hammer), to stay in their bucolic farmhouse for the summer and assist with his studies. Elio is leery of Oliver and resentful of losing his bed to him. This turns out to be temporary, as the pair become friends and, eventually, lovers.

Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel, Gaudagnino nods to the themes of closeted Judaism and homosexuality found in the book (Aciman grew up in Egypt, where exhibiting one of these traits, or both, isn’t kosher). The story of Elio finding his first unlikely love in the most quixotic, confused way takes center stage—and the coming-of-age chemistry between Chalamet and Hammer is palpable, captured by the lush cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.

Gaudagnino expertly balanced sensual style, slice-of-life simplicity, and literary substance with “I Am Love,” and he’s equally assured here. “Call Me” is a languorous romance, steeped in the invigoration of art as life, the beauty of its setting, the intelligence of its characters, their scholarly fascinations and emotional depths, and the respect and detail afforded to their stories. The sexual and familial politics are an unobtrusive background to the world in which Elio and Oliver change each other and the lives of those who love them without judgment.

As Perlman tells Elio, “Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once.” Though it’s happening in the present of its time, “Call Me by Your Name” is a bittersweet, contemporary reminiscence of roads not taken.