Sam Johnson
Andre Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name is not a new work. Considered a staple of queer fiction, it enjoyed a much-lauded release in 2007 and settled into its cult following alongside Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with grace. That is, until this year, at which time I seized the opportunity to do this review, as I still have a considerable amount of feelings about this book, and each time I imagine a room full of Sundance critics, all with their little notebooks and pencils out, watching Timothee Chalamet jack off onto an apricot as Sufjan Stevens plays in the background I have to go lie down in a dark room. To set the scene: Call Me By Your Name takes place in the Italian Riviera in the year 1983 and chronicles seventeen year old Elio “Thirst Has No Curfew” Perlman’s intense quest for the ass of the twenty-four year old grad student staying at the family villa for the summer. Ideally a reader’s introductory experience with this novel would also occur while summering in the Italian Riviera, holding a margarita in each hand, and soaking in a bathtub full of even more tequila. Call Me By Your Name is Peak Beach Reading masquerading as Serious Fiction, which is ridiculous considering it’s the literary equivalent of an uncomfortably erotic yet couture fragrance ad. Peel back the heavy layers of pretension that insist this novel is capital-L Literary, and you end up with a much more enjoyable, if slightly trashy, period romance of the dollar-on-Kindle variety. I won’t lie; this is difficult work. Andre Aciman is white, male, and a professor of literary theory. The prose is dense, and three-fourths of the book is Elio getting a nosebleed if Oliver--the grad student--so much as brushes against Elio’s foot under the dinner table. Elio is a teen as well as our narrator, and there is much wailing and rending of garments as he experiences every emotion at once during innocuous leisure activities that require Oliver to be slightly naked and imminently bangable. While fun at first, this dynamic continues through the majority of the book, only resolved in the last quarter once the reader is fully identified with Elio in his desperate desire for our heros to just fuck already, please God. The unexpected upside to the literary review circuit throwing Aciman their panties and comparing him to Proust (gag), is that their effusive praise lends enough Artistic Credibility to the property to option it for a movie. Which brings us to today. A scene: Armie Hammer as Oliver, hairy-chested and square-jawed, runs across a sunny lawn clad only in a tight pair of mint-green swim trunks, to rub sunscreen all over Timothee Chalamet’s appealingly twinky body. In the clip, we watch as Chalamet-as-Elio’s soul visibly leaves his body to scream his sexual frustration into the void. The camera pays loving attention to Oliver’s ridiculous dinner-plate hands on the Elio’s birdlike shoulder before tracking Elio’s line of sight, predictably deadlocked on Oliver’s ass as he runs past to Play A Sport. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know why it happened. And yet, dear reader, I feel as blessed as if Alanis Morissette herself had descended from the heavens singing isn’t it ironic, and dropped this movie into my lap in our shared national nightmare of 2017. I shouldn’t even call this a movie, it’s a film. It’s Art. Somewhere in this film’s 130 minute runtime Elio will have sex with an apricot--yes, you read that right--that someone else will eat, and Sufjan Stevens will sing mournfully in the background about crosses and turtledoves, and it will possibly be the most tremendous thing that’s ever happened to me. This is the medium that Call Me By Your Name deserves to be told in, the medium that can truly capture the lush, fever-dream atmosphere of the novel while cutting through the gordian knot of Aciman’s prose. Elio is still our narrator, but each clip of the film that emerges puts the heavy emotional lifting on his and Oliver’s body language and the negative space crowding their sparse dialogue. It’s easier to lean into the tropey, romance-novel underpinnings of the book with the visuals conveying so much important information. If there were bodices here, they’d be ripping. If there were members, they’d be throbbing. Perhaps best of all, this movie was picked up by Sony Picture Classics, which means a wider distribution and a lower chance I’ll have to sell my internal organs to see it. I can’t wait. And this time I’ll experience this story in the way it was meant to be experienced; in the full bloom of summer, a little turned on, and saluting Luca Guadagnino with a flask of something terrible.
1 Comment
Tal
2/16/2017 03:11:21 pm
This is beautiful.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
April 2018
Categories |