How 'Call Me By Your Name' Depicts Love and Desire

Call Me By Your Name is a simple yet powerful story about a brief love affair between two young men during a summer. After the flood of love themes being repeatedly portrayed, it still touches people with such a simple narrative, probably because it presents love in its most original and authentic form.

An Inevitable Romance

In most love stories, there are various obstacles that may come from society, family, time, space, or self. These obstacles are not only the source of dramatic conflicts but also weaken the exploration of the core of love itself. However, this movie creates an almost closed space from the beginning.

In the summer of 1983, in a small town in Italy, complex mobile communication had not yet invaded people's inner and outer space, and paper and pen were still commonly used tools for expression and communication. Everything in the villa, orchard, maids did not require Elio to worry about. He just needed to focus on writing music, listening to music, reading, eating on time, and all the daily trivial matters that might hinder his spiritual life were insulated from him.

The resistance from family and society towards homosexuality was also absent here. Elio's parents were open-minded intellectuals who told him, " You know that you can talk to us about anything." When they became aware of his feelings for Oliver, they simply expressed their support casually, not making Elio feel embarrassed or ashamed.

This is a space that can almost be called zero-resistance. And besides that, it's distortedly beautiful - sunshine, orchards, clear blue seawater, endless apricot juice, young and beautiful bodies, flowing music, interspersed philosophical discussions. It's full of love catalysts. Then, two beautiful and intelligent boys meet. It is almost impossible not to have a love affair.

The near-perfect situation does not exist in the real world, of course. However, it is precisely because it does not exist that it is fascinating. The advantage of a movie is that it does not have to consider possibilities; it only needs to create the most suitable situation for the story text according to its own wishes. For the audience, such a beautiful space not only satisfies all our aesthetic needs but also focuses all our attention on the love itself as the theme.

Waiting

The theme of waiting repeatedly appears, stretching the anxiety and nervousness in love, creating tension. And the most heartwarming wait in the movie lasted a whole day. After deliberately being avoided, Elio pondering over and over again, tearing off the straightforward and passionate confession, and finally wrote on the note handed to Oliver: “I can’t stand the silence. I need to talk to you.” The next day, he saw Oliver’s message on the desk: “Grow up. I'll see you at midnight.”

Elio glanced at his watch and rubbed Oliver’s note against his lips. During the long wait that followed, Elio’s action of looking at his watch repeated seven times, faintly showing his impatience with the passage of time. Even though Elio was intimate with Marzia all afternoon, he appeared distracted because he frequently checked his watch. It seemed that his entanglement with Marzia was just an attempt to shift his attention and endure this long wait.

On the other hand, Oliver was also filled with anxiety. In order to indirectly express this, the director had Oliver grab Elio’s wrist when he left the table at lunchtime, seemingly casually asking for the time. The camera focuses twice on the wristwatch, once when Elio carefully takes it off and places it on the table before getting intimate with Marzia in the attic, and once when Elio's father returns it to him after he's finished playing the piano at night. This significant action was a signal that the waiting was coming to an end.

Waiting is a process of brewing, restraining desires, and eroding needs, allowing emotions and desires to accumulate little by little until they are given permission by time. Elio came to the balcony at midnight, and the night was as tranquil as water. Oliver gently placed his hand on Elio's hand on the railing, ending their waiting game. This simple gesture made viewers feel sweet inside, surpassing even kisses and hugs.

Making people wait - this is an eternal authority that transcends all powers in the world and an ancient pastime of mankind.

Pathological

The film presents Elio as a fragile teenager - slender, delicate features and a beautiful face framed by glossy curls. In the movie, he experiences two episodes of physical discomfort - a sudden nosebleed at the dinner table` and vomiting while dancing with Oliver in front of a church at night. In the novel, Elio's nosebleed is caused by Oliver touching him under the table. However, the movie doesn't explicitly state this. Later, when Oliver and Elio are alone, Oliver asks Elio if he's going to have another nosebleed while his foot rests on Elio's. This also hints at the reason behind Elio's nosebleed.

In the film, Elio's discomfort is itself a metaphor for love. Love and illness always reflect each other, as Susan Sontag quotes in The Magic Mountain: "The symptoms of illness are the manifestations of the hidden power of love; all illness is nothing but a distorted form of love."

Pathological love led to the death of Werther and Anna Karenina, and even if we ignore such extreme cases, people who are struck by love are always disoriented, either melancholic or joyful, with emotions that are both indescribable and difficult to dispel, as if they were infected with an unknown disease.

Body and Desire

The entire film is loudly praising desire. Under the scorching Italian summer sun, the two main characters are depicted with bare chests, slender legs, and the girls' beautiful curves and lazy hair, all so appetizing. Parallel to this are the ancient Greek sculptures presented in archaeological research in the film.

When Elio's archaeologist father invited Oliver to classify slides together, Oliver couldn't help but say, "They all look so sexy," looking at these sculptures with full figures, tight muscles, and a sense of movement. Historically, the rationalism of classicism gradually gave way to the praise of humanity and the secular world during the Hellenistic period, which is what the director expects to express pure and sacred human desire. The language used by Elio's father to evaluate these sculptures is moving: "These sculptures are not rigid trunks, they have curves, casualness, and therefore blur the traces of time, as if daring to desire your favor."

In the film, Elio is the subject of desire. Whether it is with Oliver, Marzia, or masturbation, his passion is intense and straightforward. Without any distractions or shame, he expresses his desire as cleanly as Eve before tasting the forbidden fruit, even with a touch of innocence.

Desire is like water, intangible and addictive, which is why scenes related to water are often seen in movies, each one hinting at the protagonist's inner longing and admiration. When Oliver first invited Elio to swim in the pool, Elio only leaned against the edge of the pool, cautious and hesitant, while Oliver swam back and forth in the narrow pool, appearing lonely.

In a later scene, the two talked across the pool, yearning for each other yet keeping their distance, creating a huge tension. It wasn't until Elio took a detour to the other side of the pool to pick up Oliver's manuscript that Oliver suddenly flipped over and fell into the water without warning. The shadow of a person in the water was vaguely visible, implying that Oliver had become addicted and unable to extricate himself.

When Elio took Oliver to his secret spot, the two finally revealed their hearts and played around in the water. The spring water was crystal clear, and their desire only went as far as a kiss. And when they spent their first night together, the fact that they went swimming in the lake at dawn indicated their complete immersion in each other.

Imagery

[Sunglasses]

In the first half of the movie, Elio and Oliver frequently wear sunglasses. At the beginning of their budding romance, both sides were trying to read each other's emotions, testing and restraining themselves. Sunglasses are like a mask that hides their feelings. When Elio pretends to be indifferent to Oliver and tries to set him up with Chiara, Oliver responds with a cold remark. Later, when they sat in the cramped back seat of a car, they both wore sunglasses, even though they were sitting close to each other. It wasn't until they were on the beach, staring into each other's eyes, that they took off their sunglasses and shook hands over a broken bronze arm, declaring a truce.

Wearing sunglasses gives the appearance of a certain dignity and superiority, but it actually reveals their genuine emotions. However, what may be causing them pain is not being seen through but rather having to hide their love and reveal some of it at the same time. If you ignore it, the signal I give you will only break my heart even more. Just like when Elio saw Oliver get up to go to the bathroom at midnight, deliberately turn on the lamp on his bedside table, hold his breath, and lay in bed waiting, only to find that Oliver had returned to his room without looking back, so he muttered "traitor" while turning off the light.

[Cigarettes and Hexagrams]

Smoking is Elio's hobby. When Oliver and Elio rode their bikes to town, they stopped at a grocery store to buy cigarettes. While Elio was smoking the cigarette that Oliver handed him, he said, "I thought you didn't smoke," and Oliver turned his head and said, "I don't." Then he smiled. Smoking is a sign that Oliver is getting closer to Elio. When they met on the midnight balcony, Oliver held a lit cigarette in his hand while holding Elio's hand.

This mimicking behavior also appeared in Elio. The movie gave a close-up of the hexagram on his chest when Oliver had breakfast with Elio's family in the sunny courtyard for the first time. If the movie camera represents Elio's perspective, then Elio notices his necklace on the first day. After Elio and Oliver revealed their hearts to each other, Elio told Oliver that he also had a similar hexagram, but he didn't wear it often because his mother said they were cautious Jews. But after this conversation, Elio put on the hexagram necklace and kept it in his mouth.

Imitating the words and deeds of the other party because of admiration and worship is common behavior. More than two thousand years ago, Socrates admitted in The Symposium: "I dress like this to walk with a young man with extraordinary temperament." Lovers try to achieve emotional communication through imitation, making the image of love an entity, blending with each other, and projecting themselves wholeheartedly onto each other. This is also one of the annotations to the movie titled Call Me By Your Name.