London Film Festival: Call Me By Your Name review - Blazing hot romance destined for glory

Don't miss Luca Guadagnino's melancholic masterpiece
Enchanting: Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in the gorgeously melancholy Call Me By Your Name
Charlotte O'Sullivan14 November 2017

It’s the year’s hottest romance, destined for Oscar glory and all that jazz. Yet Luca Guadagnino’s latest will require you to read sub-titles and contains not one A list star. Armie Hammer? Few Brits can spell his name, let alone reel off his films. Redolent of James Spader, he has a top note of Jeff Daniels. In other words, he’s blond and fetchingly rectangular. You’d call him a straight man except that, here, he’s not.

Italy, 1983. Oliver (Hammer) is a punctilious, apparently confident, postgraduate from New England, spending six weeks at the villa of a professor (Michael Stuhlbarg), whose musical, trilingual, 17-year- old son, Elio (Timothée Chalamet), has never been laid.

Oliver’s buff. Elio has pins like a grasshopper. That the pair’s bodies will collide seems implausible. Yet (while they’re looking at a war memorial) Elio says Oliver’s name, as if grinding his groin against the word. Before long, Oliver’s licking a peach that’s drenched in Elio’s semen. (Don’t try this at home, folks. I suspect the average British peach, ripened under supermarket strip-lights, offers a decidedly less delicious platform for DIY toppings.)

Anyway, like Blue is the Warmest Colour’s Adèle Exarchopoulos, Chalamet doesn’t seem to be acting. You’d swear he’s just being himself (the young American really is fluent in Italian and French; he really is playing the piano). You never know what his limbs will do next. He’s enchanting and the same goes for Hammer. The camera-work is flamboyant rather than flashy, while James Ivory’s script is full of nuance. Who’ll dislike Call Me By Your Name? The kind of fools who find Sufjan Stevens twee. The soundtrack features three of the US indie singer’s ballads and his quixotic but earthy spirit infuses the project.

A frank exchange, in this universe, is as valuable as great sex. Indeed, as the credits roll, viewers may feel the urge to contact those they’ve hurt, (or been hurt by), just so they can declare, “Friends for life!” It would be unwise to dial while drunk on this gorgeously melancholy film. But do it anyway.

The London Film Festival continues until Sunday

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