.
The sheer weight of that glance between Elio's parents, right after they've found out that Oliver's called to basically break their son's heart into a billion little pieces all over again, knocks the wind out of me every time I see
Call Me By Your Name. As if I need the wind knocked out of me another time by that point in the film! I already can't breathe, dammit.
But the movie persists, and so should we. Watching the movie, over and over, I mean. I went my 18th time last night - yes even though it's
been on blu-ray for two long weeks (say it like Annella) the film's still on the big screen here in New York, proving to me one more time that New York is the place to be.
Finding out I went an 18th time probably doesn't surprise you, but you wanna hear something actually surprising? I haven't watched the blu-ray one time yet. I did watch the (scant) extras on the disc, save the commentary. But as long as I can still see the film in the theater, I'm going to go see it in the theater when the mood strikes me. It's a privilege to have the option, one I'm not going to be ignoring as long as I'm able.
And honestly the second the opening credits come up a smile spreads across my face and I'm lost anew, every time. I try to keep a mental checklist of "Things I should write about that
I haven't written about yet" (such things do actually still exist, believe it or not) but I get so captivated by the movie still that I've usually forgotten the specifics of those thoughts by the time it's over, since they are all, at this point, littler things. Things like...
... the strange and surprising angles that Luca shoots Timothée and Armie at times - "they're all curved, sometimes impossibly curved, and so nonchalant... hence their ageless ambiguity, as if they're daring you to desire them." Timothée posing above actually takes place simultaneously with his father speaking those lines and it always shocks me, the effortless (one might say "nonchalant") way that Timmy transforms his body in one quick shift from subject (staring straight at us) to demure object (curling up fetal like). But then the shifting power balances in the film...
.
.
... are one of its most striking - and pretty specifically homosexual, I should add! - aspects. For all of Luca's talk of the universality of this story it still speaks plainly, furiously at times, to what it means for one man to fall in love with another man, and how unsettling that can be. How it requires a letting-go inside of us of the behaviors we've been taught; a shift in our inner balance. Something like the swap from "I thought you should know"...
... to "I wanted you to know." There is of course power at play in male-female relationships, but it's a different dynamic usually (I'm speaking in generalities here, obviously). It wasn't that I found it uneasy to be a submissive or passive partner when the time came - it was more just a shock that that was even an option. It's not what little boys, even in the most open-minded of households, are generally taught about what it means to be "male." And we see Elio dealing with that same realization over the course of the film. In his interactions with Marzia we see...
... him much more confident and brash; he knows the role he is supposed to be playing with her. We never see him more aroused by her then when she explicitly states how much power he has over her. ("You're so hard!") But with Oliver Elio is unsure and awkward about what to do; who he even is. His sense of self sputters. But funny enough he finds himself...
... in and through that confusion.
Nature, and her cunning ways.
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