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).
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