Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Saw Call Me By Your Name, since I'd just seen Luca and wanted to understand the jokes online.  This film was good and subtle, but I think somewhat over my head.

The plot is this: we follow Elio, a teenager in Italy where he lives an a palatial villa with his archaeologist father and mother.  His life is complicated by the arrival of Oliver, a hunky grad student.  They have a mutual unstated attraction which results in them circling each other, attracted but shy and uncertain.  The emotions are the top level of the film here and there are a few swooning moments where Elio's face is covered with flickering colors, or he lays in bed, fretting and dreaming.

The film reminded me a lot of some French new wave films.  There's the familiar European sense of ennui and possibility.  The characters' actions are not as well-explained as one might hope and there's a lot of wistful stares and indolent lolling.  There are excellent, naturalistic performances but they are portrayals of uncertainty, hope, brave faces, and other ambiguous stances.  There's a moment when Elio touches his lip, suddenly uncertain if he's done the right thing in following Oliver to town which combines such guilelessness and honesty.

Speaking of touching lips, there's a few moments where characters touch each other's lips with their fingers.  A sunken statue of a wrestler is pulled up from the ocean and Oliver strokes the statue's mouth.  What this repetition indicates beyond just strong desire is not clear to me.  There's also some other theme going on with fruits and their association with fertility, maturity.  A piece of fruit features prominently in one of the sex scenes and there's an early discussion of the etymology of "apricot" which, Oliver claims, means the "the precocious one".  Since the film is centered on Elio, I feel (not to be too crass) that he is the fruit - both in terms of being precocious and also in the sense of being desired and desirable.

Alas, there's a significant age difference between Elio and Oliver which made me a bit uncomfortable.  Elio is supposed to be 17 but looks younger and Oliver is supposed to be 23 but looks older.  It's appropriate for being set in Italy and being surrounded with statues of wrestlers and slave boys.  The relationship feels like the prototypical Greek teacher and student relationship which Oscar Wilde named as the "love which dare not speak its name."  The film portrays their relationship as being only a good thing, but I would quietly feel uncomfortable about it in real life, and doubly so when writing the above about ripe fruits and so on.

So, I feel I mostly experienced the film as an aesthetic experience.  I appreciated the beauty and class of it.  Similar to French new wave, I felt there was something deeper on its mind which I could only sense via murky symbolism, but that symbolism was not clear enough for me to interpret.  The central relationship is golden and impossible, and the film is a sort of nap in an Italian villa: sophisticated, intelligent, slightly decadent, a little dull, very beautiful.