Call Me By Your Name (2017), dir. Luca Guadagnino

I came across Call Me By Your Name in December, while on a quest to discover more and more unknown LGBTQ movies.

Watch this movie for the beautiful and inspiring Perlman family dynamics, a real, tangible portrait of the awkwardness and inexperience of a seventeen-year-old handling desire the only way he knows how, Sufjan Stevens’ angelic voice, the richness of northern Italy, real characters portrayed with Oscar-worthy (now Oscar-nominated) acting, and a beautiful story.

Today CMBYN is a nominee for four Academy Awards, and my present self is jubilantly telling my December 2017 ‘this-friggin’-movie-deserves-an-Oscar’-proclaiming-self ‘I told you so’.
I’m hoping that being nominated for three Academy awards along with the Academy Award for Best Picture would aid toward drawing more eyes towards this masterpiece.

The following monologue is one of my favorites and contains MAJOR SPOILERS, so don’t read ahead if you haven’t seen the movie.

“You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was.”
“Oliver was Oliver,” I said, as if that summed things up.
“Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi (“Because it was he, because it was I”),” my father added, quoting Montaigne’s all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boetie.
I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë’s words: because “he’s more myself than I am.”
“Oliver may be very intelligent,” I began. Once again, the disingenuous rise in intonation announced a damning but hanging invisibly between us. Anything not to let my father lead me any further down this road.
“Intelligent? He was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. He was good, and you were both lucky to have found each other, because you too are good.
“My father had never spoken of goodness this way before. It disarmed me.
“I think he was better than me.”
“I am sure he’d say the same thing about you, which flatters you both.
When you least expect it, nature has cunning ways finding our weakest spot. Just…remember I’m here. Right now you may not want to feel anything, maybe you never wanted to feel anything. And…maybe its not to me you wanna speak about these things but feel something you obviously did.

“You had a beautiful friendship, maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough, but I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!

“I’ll say one more thing; it’ll clear the air.

“I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mock-up, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow, pain – don’t kill it. Embrace it with the joy you felt.”

– Mr. Perlman to Elio, Call Me By Your Name