Thursday, February 1, 2018

Nosh 97: 'Call Me by Your Name' & More

By David Elliott
                                                  
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.
Note: Nosh 98 will appear on Friday, Feb. 16.


APPETIZER: Review of Call Me by Your Name
My projection candle did not burn to see Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name. His elegant I Am Love was Italo-crafted to flaunt an upscale erotic bravura (it even had sexy prawns). A Bigger Splash emitted an earthier heat, with Ralph Fiennes ripping around like a jolly, boozed Bacchus. The trailer for Call Me has a languorous, voyeuristic emphasis that made me think “Here we go again, back to the naughty old oo-la-la.” Back to when imported films winked and peeped European skin, the genuinely adult ones trailing veils of cultural knowingness. Most American cities had one or two theaters that survived simply by getting one or two such movies a year.

The old woo revives in this film, but Call Me is also drawing audiences with genuine shadings and subtleties. It surpasses the coffee table va-voom of I Am Love and the goaty, Club Med gusto of A Bigger Splash. The script, by the late James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel, has Ivory’s trademarks: literary textures, lofty tourism and a pensive feel for time folding into nostalgia. It is a coming-of-age story set in 1983, about slender Elio (Timothée Chalomet), a brainy pianist and, at 17, still sexually a wavering, quivering reed. His expat father is an esteemed classics professor, who each summer invites a star student to spend the season with his family at their northern Italian villa. The Perlmans are demurely Jewish. Or as Elio’s elegant French mother (Amira Casar) puts it, with a smile, “Jews of discretion.”

Not so discretely Euro-cultural. Languages flit like glib crickets above elegantly rustic meals at the old villa, as servants quietly hover. It’s fine when Dad and the guest student display their etymological savvy. It is charming in a showy way when Elio performs Bach in the manner of Lizst, then the Lizst version a la Busoni. It’s a bit much when gracious Mom translates an old French tale from German into English, milking  every nuance. The cultural climax is Dad taking Elio and the grad student to see a Greco-Roman statue of a nude wrestler, being pulled from a lake. It’s time-trip magic, like the ancient rooms uncovered in Fellini’s Roma. Fans of kitsch archeology may recall Boy on a Dolphin (1957), starring Alan Ladd, Sophia Loren and a sexy Greek statue liberated from the Aegean.

Elio is a boy riding the dolphin of emergence. The student, the older Oliver (Armie Hammer), could be a whale of a ride. The tall, blonde American has the Mr. Malibu looks of a surfing Apollo. To his credit, Hammer doesn’t simply play a cool, knowing seducer. Though deeply stirred, he tries to push back the teen’s impulsive gambits with “I want to be good” (mainly as a guest, not as a stud). Inevitably he finds Elio irresistible. The movie is compulsively erectile. Half of it is simply (but sensitively) foreplay – for a love that may not speak its name but will certainly find sexy translation. After so much build-up the sex is less than fireworks, but a midsummer’s love has been born. And the emotions ring true at every step.

The photography, playing freely with light and focus, is a floating fresco of warm Italian walls and fields and summer heat, with ripe fruit, fat flies and cool water. Pretty girls ogle Elio, who is like a rebirth of Donatello’s David. One fair lass is used by Elio like a sexual merit badge, but he is caught in the coils of that old fascination enshrined by Plato, which the Victorians called “Greek love.” Timothée Chalamet’s vain but self-doubting, bright but immature Elio gives the story a humming sincerity within its erotic buzz. There is nothing new about the gay/straight tensions, nor the film’s bouquet basket of multiculturalism, yet the young American actor (now 22, of French parentage) fills the movie’s heart, and has won a deserved Oscar nomination.

Every generation needs its own youth, its own films. It would be silly to expect many of this lusty reverie’s young fans to know about the derivations that pour into it: the exquisite, tragic take on a rich Jewish-Italian family in De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis; the eroticized family politics of Malle’s Murmur of the Heart; the disturbingly intimate Roman eroticism in Bertolucci’s La Luna and the fascistic sublimation of homoeroticism in his The Conformist. A remark about change echoes the central idea in Visconti’s The Leopard, while the heartfelt pathos of trapped identity has roots in Ivory’s Maurice and Scola’s A Special Day. Call Me by Your Name swans its moods and is almost comically teasing. But it is also a movingly human story of desire, love and friendship, right through the final remarks of the caring father (excellent Michael Stuhlbarg) and a great shot of Elio, a boy who can now find his maturity from real experience.



SALAD (A List)
Twelve Remarkable Coming-of-Age Performances: Katharine Hepburn as Alice in Alice Adams, 1935; Julie Harris as Frankie in A Member of the Wedding, 1952; James Dean as Cal in East of Eden, 1955; Anthony Perkins as Josh in Friendly Persuasion, 1956; Carroll Baker as Baby in Baby Doll, 1956; Helen Mirren as Cora in Age of Consent, 1969; Benoit Ferreaux as Laurent in Murmur of the Heart, 1970; Timothy Bottoms as Sonny in The Last Picture Show, 1971; Molly Ringwald as Andie in Pretty in Pink, 1986; Kate Winslet as Rose in Titanic, 1997; Alice Teghil as Caterina in Caterina in the Big City, 2012, and Tye Sheridan as Ellis in Mud, 2013. (Photo above: artist James Mason makes a sand sculpture of Helen Mirren in Age of Consent.)

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
While Touch of Evil (1958) can be seen as prescient of the later binge of goth-horror shockers, also previewed by Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it has Welles’s charged, corkscrewing mix of different styles, periods and genres: “Welles was able to give life to expressionist theatrics when a great many movies were shot on location, and when dramatists like Chayefsky and Inge were praised for their ‘realism.’ In a sense, Touch is the last flowering of artful crime melodrama from the ‘40s, a style that survives in our own day in the form of nostalgic imitations. Debased as (its) world is, the actors seem driven by beautiful demons, the shadowy rooms and buildings retain a certain voluptuous romanticism … Perhaps because he has never taken thrillers very seriously, Welles exaggerated everything to the point of absurdity.” (From James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“Quentin Tarantino exposes and exploits words with an Elizabethan (and black) succulence. He delves, noted Stanley Crouch, into ‘the artistic challenges of the many miscegenations that shape the goulash of American culture,’ and by his skill ‘the human nuances and surprises in the writing provide fresh alternatives of meaning, as they render a grittier, more relaxed integration (rarely found) in American films.’ Tarantino seems to have been ‘born knowing.’” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)  

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.



Gangly teen Laurent (Benoit Ferreaux) meets a girl at a clinic in Le Soufflé au Couer (Murmur of the Heart; Palomar, 1971, director Louis Malle, cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

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