Not affiliated with Harvard College. Troubling ‘Call Me By Your Name’: Stylized Writing as a Way to Complexity. The film is about romantic awakening, but it is also about awakenings more generally, growing up and learning about the world. GradeSaver, Read the Study Guide for Call Me by Your Name (2017 Film)…, The Film Version of 'Call Me by Your Name' - Research on Masculinity and Sexuality, One Lens, One Film: Emphasis on Approach to Cinematographic Craft in Guadagnino's 'Call Me by Your Name', 35mm: Emphasis on Approach to Cinematographic Craft in Guadagnino's 'Call Me by Your Name', Elio’s Feelings Through The Form And Structure in Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman, View Wikipedia Entries for Call Me by Your Name (2017 Film)…. I felt like a deaf and dumb person who can’t even use sign language. Teachers and parents! What unsettled me, though, was not the fancy footwork needed to redeem myself. “I’m just not very good at speaking.” In this moment, Elio stops worrying about speaking in “code” and finally states what’s on his mind. Guadagnino considers Call Me by Your Name a "homage to the fathers of my life: my own father, and my cinematic ones", referring to the filmmakers Jean Renoir, J… He pays such close attention to these nuances because they provide him with the only chance he has to express his feelings. After he falls in love with Oliver, he can barely contain his urges, masturbating with a peach, putting Oliver's bathing suit over his head to get closer to him, and seducing the older man clumsily and confidently. From the very beginning, Elio doesn’t know what to make of the way Oliver communicates. While it may seem that Elio and Oliver's affair is secret and completely unseen by the surrounding world, Elio's parents seem to have an idea of what is going on, and they share knowing glances throughout about the little crush that their son has developed on the hunky academic staying with them. So long as I had breath to put words in my mouth, I could more or less carry it off. But I also wanted my verb to carry the persuasive knockout punch with which, not the person who has a crush on us, but their closest friend, takes us aside and says, Look, I think you ought to know, so-and-so worships you. It was the unwelcome misgivings with which it finally dawned on me, both then and during our casual conversation by the train tracks, that I had all along, without seeming to, without even admitting it, already been trying—and failing—to win him over. In turn, Oliver doesn’t respond to what Elio has said, instead telling him to wait in the street while he goes to pick up papers from his translator—an indication that Elio has spoken too directly. “I worship you,” he says, thinking that this is “the safest, and ultimately murkiest, thing [he] could come up with.” He feels this way because the word “worship” can be interpreted as either a romantic obsession or a childish preoccupation. Aciman’s novel showcases the significance of language in fraught relational contexts. Or did you shower to forget, to wash away all traces of last night’s smut and degradation? But Call Me By Your Name offers more positive messages – that it is up to us how (or whether) to define our relationships; that reaching out to the … The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. When he does this, Oliver asks, “Do you know what you’re saying?” This is an interesting response, as it indicates that Oliver wants to give Elio an excuse; he clearly knows Elio has feelings for him, but he’s afraid to hear him admit it, so he offers him an out by giving him the opportunity to play dumb. The film explores the story of a young person discovering their erotic impulses and embracing their sexuality, with all the embarrassment, excitement, and heartbreak that entails. The Question and Answer section for Call Me by Your Name (2017 Film) is a great These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Call Me by Your Name (2017 Film), directed by Luca Guadagnino. Elio flinches and leans away because he fears that if he lets Oliver keep touching him, he’ll surrender to the embrace and thus reveal his feelings. Call Me by Your Name (2017 Film) essays are academic essays for citation. As seventeen-year-old Elio experiences his first serious relationship, he finds himself drawn to the ways he and Oliver are the same. As seventeen-year-old Elio experiences his first serious relationship, he finds himself drawn to the ways he and Oliver are the same. (including. That was the extent of my code. This is highlighted by the note of Oliver's that he finds in the Heraclitus book: "The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing." I couldn’t understand how boldness and sorrow, how you’re so hard and do you really care for me? Additionally, the secrecy of their love heightens its thrill and brings them even closer together. I gave myself credit for getting the truth off my chest, all the while finding a loophole for immediate retreat in case I’d ventured too far. For him, noticing Oliver's confidence wearing this symbol of his Jewish identity felt like staring at something “timeless, ancestral, immortal” in both of them. Call Me By Your Name Symbols, Allegory and Motifs Star of David Necklace (Symbol) Elio likes looking at the Star of David on Oliver’s neck. As such, they use other modes of communication, like the way they touch or avoid touching. Struggling with distance learning? Although they haven’t yet established a romantic relationship, Elio resents Oliver’s “dismissive” tone because it makes him feel insignificant, as if Oliver doesn’t care about him. Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don’t want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place—all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. Last Reviewed on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. The audience gets a front-row seat to Elio's feeling of heartbreak, a painful and shattering rite of passage. How I admired people who talked about their vices as though they were distant relatives they’d learned to put up with because they couldn’t quite disown them. Music (Motif) Music is a central motif in the film, as Elio is a voracious student of music, both interpreting compositions on the piano and guitar, as well as writing his own. A kiss on the mouth was not a prelude to a more comprehensive contact, it was already contact in its totality. Call Me by Your Name is the final installment in a thematic trilogy Guadagnino calls his "Desire" trilogy; the other two parts were I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015). How I wished I could say such a thing one day—that I didn’t care to remember what I’d done at night in full morning glory. He never stops trying to develop a linguistic mode that aligns with his and Oliver’s love, and this shows that Aciman believes in the importance of this effort. He’s dumbfounded by his casual use of language, especially when he says, “Later!” “I’d never heard anyone use ‘later’ to say goodbye before,” Elio notes. LitCharts Teacher Editions. As a result, he goes from avoiding his feelings to stating them outright, once again failing to operate in the linguistic middle ground in which Oliver is so comfortable. This, it seems, is the mark of a mature communicator, someone who can act one way while feeling another way. ‘Call Me by Your Name’ is a beautiful Italian love story between two males set in the early 1980s. Throughout, we hear quotes from philosophers of antiquity and see images of ancient statues, which often have some kind of homoerotic context. In this way, he becomes evasive, protecting his inner thoughts even as he longs to make them known. I don’t care to remember, Look, I think you ought to know, so-and-so worships you, Easy-to-use guides to literature, poetry, literary terms, and more, Super-helpful explanations and citation info for over 30,000 important quotes, Unrestricted access to all 50,000+ pages of our website and mobile app. Although Elio is attuned to the nuances of language, he hasn’t yet had enough experience to confidently communicate in fraught relational contexts. Elio's father is a professor of archaeology and studies the ancients, which is the area of study that has drawn Oliver there to stay with the Perlmans. Elio and Oliver arrived in Rom and went to their hotel. Finding an appropriate lexicon is a worthwhile endeavor, he suggests, even if some relationships are so nuanced that they resist language. Towards the end, Elio's father gives him an impassioned speech about the importance and dignity of his feelings for Oliver, urging him not to repress his heartache, but to embrace it. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. And yet, he had shown me that what I wanted could be given and taken so naturally that one wonders why it needed such hand-wringing torment and shame, seeing it was no more complicated a gesture than, say, buying a pack of cigarettes, or passing a reefer, or stopping by one of the girls behind the piazzetta late at night and, having settled on a price, going upstairs for a few minutes. A great deal of their love is wordless, inarticulate, and visceral. We watch as he experiences the lilts and troughs of young love, worrying, waiting, consummating, wondering. “Oliver was Oliver,” I said, as if that summed things up. There is a kind of erotic excitement that each of them gets from being private about their connection to one another, and they barely speak to one another except to debate or seduce. And yet, the most resonant part of “Call Me By Your Name” may not even be the romance itself, but rather the lingering sensation that it can’t last, which Guadagnino evokes through long takes and expert use of silence. I reached for him and muffled my sobs against his shoulder. Call Me By Your Name draws on ancient themes while mingling together deeply human experiences. -Graham S. Below you will find the important quotes in, “Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. The film is about the budding of a young person's sexuality, not only his desire for sex and his attraction to other people, but also his emergent identity as a homosexual. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." could be so thoroughly bound together. “It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again.” When Elio posits that Oliver’s “Later!” sounds like it’s spoken with “veiled indifference,” readers see that he’s already reading deeply into the relational implications of Oliver’s words. I stammered all manner of things so as not to speak my mind. By underlining Elio’s struggle to find a language that reflects his feelings and desires, then, Aciman presents communication as an important but volatile part of understanding a romantic relationship. And I was crying for the evil thoughts I’d nursed against him this morning. His bond with Oliver is complicated, and many of their thoughts and feelings remain unspoken. Did you take a shower to perk yourself up because your system wouldn’t hold up otherwise? The way the content is organized, LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in, Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…, The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Language and Communication appears in each chapter of. I stammered all manner of things so as not to speak my mind. This Study Guide consists of approximately 38 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Call Me by Your Name. Aciman’s novel showcases the significance of language in fraught relational contexts. At the end, after he has returned from his trip to Rome with Oliver, Marzia finds him in a town square and tells him that she has no hard feelings towards him. “I have no doubt that he must have already suspected something,” Elio notes. We see his experience of heartache, his longing for a man that is so close to him, but who is, in many ways, so incomprehensible. It connected them. Author: Tommaso Mozzati February 1, 2018. “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi,” my father added, quoting Montaigne’s all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie. This alludes to the fact that they are pursuing a gay relationship in a time when such a connection was less widely accepted in society. Several days after Elio makes his feelings clear, he tries to mitigate his blunt confession. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. “Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the … But what was certain to expose me even more was my struggle to overcome it in front of others. He stared me right in the face, as though he liked my face and wished to study it and to linger on it, then he touched my nether lip with his finger and let it travel left and right and right and left again and again as I lay there, watching him smile in a way that made me fear anything might happen now and there’d be no turning back, that this was his way of asking, and here was my chance to say no or to say something and play for time, so that I might still debate the matter with myself, now that it had reached this point—except that I didn’t have any time left, because he brought his lips to my mouth, a warm, conciliatory, I’ll-meet-you-halfway-but-no-further kiss till he realized how famished mine was. Elio Perlman is a 17-year-old Jewish-American kid whose mother’s family has a villa in Italy and whose father is a professor of archaeology and expert in Classical statuary. Call Me By Your Name, by André Aciman, charts an intense six week period in the lives of Elio, an Italian teenager, and Oliver, an American academic, as they fall in love over the course of a summer in Italy. In Call Me by Your Name, André Aciman implies that romantic attraction often involves a recognition of oneself in someone else. Rather, they share an almost ahistorical approval of their son's sexual awakening, and they encourage his exploration warmly. Call Me By Your Name is set in northern Italy in the 80s that serves as a backdrop for the affair between Elio (Chalamet) and Oliver (Hammer). Copyright © 1999 - 2021 GradeSaver LLC. Love and understanding are central themes in Luca Guadagnino's 'Call Me by Your Name,' which expanded this past weekend. The age differences between lovers in Find Me almost feel like Aciman is doubling down in response to the (relatively minimal) criticism Call Me By Your Name … I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë’s words: because “he’s more myself than I am.”, Instant downloads of all 1422 LitChart PDFs This is clearly painful for Marzia, who harbors real feelings for Elio, but he is unable to explain what is going on in his life. This news shatters Elio, who is still in love with Oliver, and we watch him as he sits in front of the fireplace and weeps. Even though he is intellectual and precocious, Elio is a naive and impressionable young man who has yet to experience his first sexual experience, his first love, his first heartbreak. I worship you.” There, I’d said it. Call Me by Your Name is also related to a number of other literary works because of the fact that Elio, Oliver, and Mr. Pearlman are so well-read. They are not the imagined middle-class parents of a gay child in the AIDS-era US. As a romance novel, Call Me By Your Name sets itself apart with its nuanced depiction of both the anticipation leading up to a romantic affair, and the emotional complexity that results after attaining a life-defining relationship. This gives Elio “a loophole for immediate retreat in case” he feels as if he’s “ventured too far.” This kind of linguistic ambiguity is exactly what he wants to achieve. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Finally, though, this charade becomes too difficult to sustain, and he makes it obvious to Oliver that he has feelings for him. Perhaps, in this, as with everything else, because I didn’t know how to speak in code, I didn’t know how to speak at all. “Do I like you, Oliver? Set mainly in the summer of one year in 1980s Italy, Call Me By Your Name (2007), Andre Aciman’s romance novel chronicles a romantic relationship that develops between an American-Italian Jewish boy, Elio Perlman, and an American Jewish doctoral student, Oliver, who stays with his family to complete academic research. “[…B]ecause I didn’t know how to speak in code, I didn’t know how to speak at all. Our, "Sooo much more helpful than SparkNotes. Especially in the initial stages of his relationship with Oliver, Elio desperately scrutinizes the language he and his lover use, often obsessing over how Oliver has worded a phrase or how he has handled himself in a conversation. And for last night as well, because, for better or worse, I’d never be able to undo it, and now was as good a time as any to show him that he was right, that this wasn’t easy, that fun and games had a way of skidding off course and that if we had rushed into things it was too late to step back from them now— crying because something was happening, and I had no idea what it was. I don’t care to remember—like I know myself—hinted at a realm of human experience only others had access to, not I. The lush backdrop of northern Italy in the summer is a prime setting for Elio's sexual awakening, his libidinous eagerness to greet the world and learn more about it. Just for him. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it. That was the extent of my code,” he writes. Elio isn’t yet able to embody the kind of communicative complexities Oliver is capable of affecting, but he does recognize this shortcoming. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!”, “This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer. He has a deep love for music, and his playing is one of the gateways through which Oliver begins interacting with him. Thus, in the wake of Oliver's departure, Elio finds that he has the comfort of friendship. When the handsome American student arrives, Eli… That and other things. Interestingly enough, he uses language to avoid saying what he actually wants to say. Both relented and expressed intense love, passion, longing and belonging to each other. The Golden Globe and Spirit Award nominated film based on André Aciman’s novel features Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg. I wanted the word to startle him and to come like a slap in the face so that it might be instantly followed with the most languorous caresses. “To worship” seemed to say more than anyone might dare say under the circumstances; but it was the safest, and ultimately murkiest, thing I could come up with. Otherwise, the silence between us would probably give me away—which was why anything, even the most spluttered nonsense, was preferable to silence. Word Count: 206. A feeling of melancholy tinges everything, from the choice of a particular shirt to the taste of a perfectly ripe peach. The novel chronicles their summer romance and the 20 years that follow. Classical music is a visual and sound motif throughout Call Me by Your Name (2017). “Yes, I know what I’m saying and you’re not mistaking any of it,” Elio replies. One day, for instance, Oliver squeezes Elio’s shoulder, massaging it in a friendly way. There is a deeper emphasis on this in the book, however. Then, at the end, Oliver calls and tells him that he is marrying a woman, and that he will live his life as a straight man. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Throughout Call Me by Your Name, Aciman presents emotional pain as valuable, inevitable, and worth experiencing. The author of Call Me by Your Name, André Aciman, stated the characters’ shared Judaism was an analogy for their shared ambiguous sexuality. The name of the film, and a pivotal moment in it, … He is seen writing, studying, and playing music in his free time. It’s the way she looks at things you’ve missed. In this way, Marzia lets him know that she has forgiven him for using her and that she wants to be friends, and the two of them make a vow to remain connected. Silence would expose me. This Study Guide consists of approximately 38 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Call Me by Your Name. There was nothing between our bodies but our clothes, which was why I was not caught by surprise when she slipped a hand between us and down into my trousers, and said, “Sei duro, duro, you’re so hard.” And it was her frankness, unfettered and unstrained, that made me harder yet now. The film is about the budding of a young person's sexuality, not only his desire for sex and his attraction to other people, but also his emergent identity as a homosexual. I was crying because I’d never known so much gratitude and there was no other way to show it. You may call them up with nothing to say, because what’s said isn’t the point. When Oliver asks him, “Do you like me that much, Elio?” he strives to answer honestly without being entirely clear. In turn, it becomes obvious that Elio is someone who spends a great deal of time thinking about words and the effect they have on people. I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him the first time, and each time I played it, I was sending it to him as a little gift, because it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extended cadenza. Elio is confused about his sexuality for much of the film, and often carries on an elaborate and performative affair with his girlfriend, Marzia, in order to make Oliver jealous. I wondered what were the other things that necessitated taking a shower. In Call Me by Your Name, André Aciman implies that romantic attraction often involves a recognition of oneself in someone else. And although Oliver doesn’t make a big deal of the situation, Elio suspects he has picked up on the subtext of this reaction. Antiquity is a lens through which the viewer is meant to perceive and think about Elio and Oliver's affair, as an extension of an ancient tradition of homoerotic affection and admiration. The film follows him as he changes into a young man.