The widely acclaimed Call Me by Your Name dares romanticize a youth-to-adult sexual relationship. It’s dressed-up as both nostalgia — set in 1983 — and Continental sophistication: Seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) becomes obsessed with Oliver (Armie Hammer), his father’s 24-year-old research assistant who has joined the family’s summer retreat in Italy. But the dreamy, erotic story (languorous, sun-bright idylls, visual fetishes such as overripe fruit and wet swim trunks) has been queered by the film’s belated release, which, after its premiere last winter at the Sundance Festival, is strikingly mistimed.
Now this tale of first love (based on a novel by André Aciman) too closely resembles the taboo of unequal sexual relations currently driving our culture’s moment of neo-Puritanism. What was calculated to appeal to pro-gay social sentiment and rouse intense compassion for a youngster’s coming-out is now exposed as a dishonest, weepy fusion of lechery and virtue-signaling.
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