'Call Me By Your Name' bears sweet, fleeting fruit

BERLIN

Timothée Chalamet

Youth has no shame, shame comes with age.

- Andre Aciman

APRICOT season is brief. It lasts only one month from mid-June to mid-July. Similarly, the relationship at the heart of Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino's ravishing new film which sets the innocence of first love against the color of the countryside and the 80s.

It's Italy, 1983. Visiting 24-year old American student Oliver (Armie Hammer) causes ripples, impressing with his very sexy etymology skills, lounging poolside in shorts, skipping dinner and cavorting in town after dark. Seventeen-year old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) tries mightily to be repelled. He complains to his mother about Oliver's refrain of "later" at the end of every conversation, is vexed that Mafalda is never informed when the guest is going to miss dinner, and bristles when girls in town are drawn to the stranger. Yet he doth protest too much. His repulsion thinly conceals a deep fascination. Something stirs, ripens.

Armie Hammer

Guadagnino's last two films I Am Love and A Bigger Splash were stylistically audacious stories in which older characters come of age. Both involve people who are out of place, who struggle to overcome barriers to their happiness. So too here. Just as the older matriarch in I Am Love fights her fascination with her son's young friend, Oliver keeps his distance. Elio submerges his impulses as well, but in a less conscious  and more confused way. But everything rises to the surface in an understated, yet sensual night-time scene.

Not under-stated is the already infamous apricot sequence, a kind of remix of the American Pie/Jason Biggs moment. It's a scene that comes straight out of Aciman's novel where even there it was so warped and overdone as to be utterly plausible and certainly unforgettable. Guadagnino turns something unfilmable into something human. He understands the power of the impulses guiding his characters and cleverly maintains the novel's use of apricots as a leitmotif throughout. If the fruit is sweet and irresistible, it is also difficult to grow, fragile and fleeting.

Some of the initial scenes with Hammer are too opaque, with little indication of Oliver's inner turmoil. Fans of the book might enjoy this as dramatic irony, knowing full well what is about to take place. Others with little knowledge of the story might be put off by the deus ex machina effect when the couple finally pair.

But there are more than enough good things carrying the film forward, notably its depiction of provincial Italy of the 80s. Sufjan Steven's soundtrack is also eerie, intense and beautiful. At the same time, Guadagnino opts out of some of the stylistic gimmicks in his previous films. The result is a simple, yet deeply affecting movie, with a stand-out performance by Chalamet. In the end there is a twist in this James Ivory script which makes us realise the buried subject of the movie might not be the two lovers after all but someone else.

Michael Stuhlbarg, Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer.