By Josh Inocéncio
Like the Oscar-winning Moonlight last year, another gay drama has cut into mainstream cinema and garnered Academy Award buzz. Based on the novel of the same title, Call Me by Your Name is a film set in 1980s Italy, following 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his fleeting summer love with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate student in his mid-20s who works temporarily as an archaeological assistant with Elio’s professor father at their decadent villa.
And similar to Moonlight, the film has split queer viewers with its depictions of gay sex (or lack thereof). In the New Yorker, film critic Richard Brody lambasts Call Me by Your Name’s “sanitized intimacy,” also arguing that director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory don’t develop the characters enough through dialogue. In Slate, Billy Gray writes that both films’ “polite, glancing treatment of same-sex actually feels like a retreat from the sexual frankness of earlier trailblazers like Brokeback Mountain, Shortbus, and Blue is the Warmest Color.”
As far as sexual intimacy, I’m not sure why there is an expectation that queer films must represent gay sex in a particular way. True, Call Me by Your Name (and Moonlight) achieved Oscar attention in a way that other, more explicit queer films in 2017 and 2016 did not. But that’s more of a statement regarding how Oscar voters choose nominees rather than the merits of a film itself.
In contrast to Brody’s criticism, the depictions of intimacy in Call Me By Your Name are hardly what I would call “sanitized.” No, we don’t get any scenes showing Elio and Oliver in Blue is the Warmest Color-like moments, but anyone who thinks the film is sanitary need only watch the famous peach scene with their mother sitting next to them. The film, told from Elio’s perspective (like the novel), is partially an exploration of self-love. While Oliver is away one afternoon, Elio grabs a pair of Oliver’s boxers, covers his head with them, and then sniffs the inside while he steadily thrusts Oliver’s bed. Later, as he’s eating a peach he’s picked from the orchard and squirting its sticky contents all over his bare stomach, he begins to masturbate into the peach. Sure, you never see Elio’s penis—only his visceral expressions—but it’s hardly a sanitary experience.
Indeed, the sex scenes are withholding—there’s no nudity when Elio finally has sex with Oliver, but where Brody and his followers use the word “sanitized,” I’d use “subtle” or even “sensual.” Some of the finest sex scenes in queer cinema don’t reveal any nudity, such as In the Grayscale (Chile, 2015) or Out in the Dark (Israel, 2012). No doubt that sex is a defining component of the queer male experience, but the characters do have sex. The film doesn’t deprive them of that mutual enjoyment and it’s a great pay-off—the tension up to the sex scene is Elio’s simultaneous curiosity of and resistance to Oliver. Early in the film, the first jarring moment of sensuality is at volleyball game when a hairy-chested, toned Oliver massages the scrawny, pale Elio’s shoulder so that he’ll loosen up. Elio pulls away and Oliver later reveals that they didn’t start their sexual journey earlier because Elio seems disinterested. From then on, the two subtly test each other’s limits and intellect in a kind of courtship until they break and make love one night after Elio’s parents have gone to bed.
As queer viewers, we shouldn’t expect every queer film to present unadulterated sexual encounters. There are plenty of films that already do that—if you find Call Me by Your Name sanitized, then watch Stranger By the Lake (France, 2013) or Weekend (UK, 2011). The content is out there. And to Gray’s comment in Slate, it’s lazy to place Call Me by Your Name in a teleology that suggests representations of gay sex are depreciating over the last two decades. (It’s simply not true and below is a list of 2017 films to prove it.) We must be more voracious viewers than that if we’re going to wade into criticisms on the sexual health of queer cinema.
But the film has also endured criticism for being light on character and even context. And it is. Alongside his critiques of sexuality, Brody also writes in his review, “they don’t ever discuss their erotic histories, their desires, their inhibitions, their hesitations, their joys, their heartbreaks…Guadagnino can’t be bothered to imagine (or to urge Ivory to imagine) what they might actually talk about while sitting together alone.” But to say the lack of dialogue undercuts the film’s beauty or the characters’ honesty is to misunderstand its genre; the film is a “summer romance.” It’s airy, it’s faraway, it’s elegiac. The story thrives on subtext, on what’s unsaid, and the prodigious performances by Chalamet and Hammer fill those gaps. And that’s realistic, too. There’s a tendency to imagine summer lovers as people who have come from nowhere, as if they’re cut from some ethereal cloth. Truthfully, I’m not interested in Oliver’s or Elio’s backstory—their previous experiences or self-admissions aren’t relevant to the story. I’m happy to glimpse their lives as they both navigate summer affairs with women and with each other. Drawing from Elio’s exploration of love and eventual heartbreak when, months later, Oliver announces his engagement to a woman, the film moves like a dream or a distant memory, hazy, even fantastical. Like Moonlight, the film is visual poetry. The camera shots, cinematography, and musical score punctuate this nostalgic memory one summer in a non-specific town “somewhere in Northern Italy.”
The film, absent (mostly) of homophobia toward either character, meditates on what every youth should have: a sanctuary of non-judgmental sexual experiences to discover who they are and what they want. Elio gets what many gay guys my age wish we could’ve had at 17—and that, to me, is what’s most emotionally engrossing about these characters. When Oliver leaves for the summer, Elio’s father has a heart-wrenching monologue where he reminisces on the love with another man that he almost had in his youth—and how he’s never found anything close (not even with Elio’s mother). When we found out that Oliver is engaged, we’re forced to watch Elio’s face as he weeps by the fire and the credits roll beside him. We bear witness to his pain, to his impossible fantasy that Oliver might return to him, but his story clearly isn’t over. While he’s heartbroken now, Elio’s future brims with a bittersweet hope.
Other 2017 Films*:
The Untamed
Handsome Devil
Beach Rats
The Ornithologist
Staying Vertical
I Dream in Another Language
Thelma
A Fantastic Woman
It’s Only the End of the World
BPM
God’s Own Country
I Am Michael
My Friend Dahmer
Paris 05:59: Theo & Hugo
Princess Cyd
Retake
Signature Move
Tom of Finland
The Wound
*List courtesy of Aaron C. Thomas.
