Eat Gay Love

Call Me By Your Name is not a gay movie. Or rather, it is not gay in the way we define gayness today. 

The critically-acclaimed film is being compared to Brokeback Mountain, Carol, and Moonlight, but this is a category error. All of those movies's characters struggle not just with themselves and each other, but against a larger, hostile culture that tries to make their love impossible. The films mostly avoid politics, but they are representative of gay rights struggles going back at least as far as the 1950s. Whatever homosexuality's place in other times, in other cultures, in modern America it has always been part of a culture war.

Call Me By Your Name wants none of that. Its vision of capital-L Love is something closer to Plato's Symposium: a nearly divine passion for another person's very essence, and certainly above something so vulgar as struggles over money or beauty or politics. (Though it curiously contains some digressions on Italian politics that are bewildering to an outsider. This is a very European movie, in so many ways.)

Thus its preposterous premise: Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), the precocious, bilingual son of an archaeology professor, lives with his parents (played by Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) during the summer in their gorgeous Italian villa, and falls for his (unnamed!) father's grad student assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer), who is handsome, arrogant, and easygoing.

Nothing about this is plausible, or at least relatable. Perhaps it's not supposed to be. A title card at the beginning announces that it takes place "Somewhere in Italy," suggesting this is a fantasy. A nice fantasy it is: would that more Classics students looked like Armie Hammer, more chiseled than the Greco-Roman sculptures the characters uncover. But Call Me By Your Name wants to be more than trashy escapism. It positively yearns for depth and hifalutin significance.

And that's where it loses me. If you're going to go for depth and emotional resonance, then it helps to construct a scenario that is at least somewhat based in reality. Put bluntly: this is a homosexual love story set in 1983, and the words HIV and AIDS are never spoken aloud.

Not every gay story need to invoke AIDS, but its conspicuous absence speaks to the larger lack of any social context here. Elio and Oliver flirt with and bed local women not to disguise and obscure their true nature, but as a way of testing and spiting each other before they can admit to their feelings. Oliver stresses about hiding his sexuality only slightly more than he hides his Jewishness. (That Jewishness adds some cultural texture to the characters, but doesn't especially inform or change them.) So thoroughly scrubbed is the narrative of the real-world details of gay experience, that one could genderswap one of the two leads and the story would be functionally identical.

It's a shame, because there is good work being done. Michael Stuhlbarg is best in show, infusing his character with humor, sympathy, and a nerdiness that does more than anything else to sell these people as academics. Timothée Chalamet nails the shameless details of being in young, obsessive love, even if the scenario doesn't allow these details to add up to much. (Hammer is technically fine, but I felt no chemistry between him and Chalamet, and I could not get over the inherent impossibility of a Winklevoss archaeology student.) The direction does some interesting things to put us in Elio's headspace, though it shies away from explicit sex--at least as far as male-on-male goes. And the film does end with its very best scenes, explaining the importance of allowing oneself to feel sorrow along with happiness, and then demonstrating just that.

But for all the craft on display, it's in service to what is for me a narrative nonstarter. Whether one gets anything out of Call Me By Your Name will depend, I suspect, on one's aesthetic sensibility. Can great art deal with sublime topics like love directly, while ignoring or minimizing real-life detail? Or it in only useful insofar as it can speak of people, to people, as they actually are? This wasn't always so pressing a question, or even a question at all; Plato famously had no use for tragedy or any such art that wouldn't put the best possible face on humanity. More recently, American culture not too long ago took it for granted that a story of Universal True Love would involve traditionally beautiful, bourgois white people. Call Me By Your Name, the novel, was published in 2007, which is really the last time that any of us could take material comfort for granted. Ten years later, in 2017, the idea of a Universal Anything is also much more suspect, particularly when its avatars bear so little resemblance to the people it purports to depict.