And I Shall Cut My Hair, Shall Make Whole Cities Weep: Love and Fear in Call Me By Your Name

More than just a film about homosexual love, Call Me By Your Name captures the very essence of the human condition. This is at once to speak in clichés while trying to avoid them. The intention is not to use the language of today’s identity politics (that there is only “one love”), which promotes tolerance under the guise of acceptance, and which homogenizes the human experience by conforming homosexuality to heteronormative expectations—like those who, in saying they do not see race, seek the safety of bland uniformity: a greyscale world. No, Call Me By Your Name is, of course, a story about homosexual love and, in an age where such stories are far too few, that must be remembered; but, the story also accomplishes what few, if any, of the many thousands of heterosexual romances already produced come close to accomplishing. The captivating power of Luca Guadagnino’s tour de force lies in its capacity to rend—from beneath the shroud of artifice, of society, of sexuality—that which is universally human: a bleeding heart.

Love is that emotion which attracts the subject to the object of its desire, just as fear, love’s opposite, repels the two. It is the curious nature of humanity that love is intermingled with fear, that at the height of love there exists such great fear. In the case of homosexuality, for most of human history, this fear is exacerbated by societal stigma and the possibility of being discovered. As Elio and Oliver wander the streets of Northern Italy together—in the tense heat of summer, under the still looming gaze of il Duce: Mussolini—they engage in fearful and loving seduction.

The film’s plot is immediately apparent and the audience expects Elio and Oliver’s relationship, but cinematic forces keep them at a distance: a proper explanation is needed for their romance. Elio and Oliver, too, feel these attractive forces, but must wait for a signal, an opening, before they may make themselves known. This similarity between the spectacle and its audience shortens the infinite distance—the empathic gap—between seat and screen. Additional wonder is instilled through the beautiful choreography of Elio’s and Oliver’s dances, their flitting to and fro, their resonance oscillating between attraction and repulsion.

Our star-crossed lovers are, like Pyramus and Thisbe before them, separated by a partition. In the villa, the veil is diaphanous, composed of a thin temporal and spatial layer: just before his arrival, Oliver’s bedroom had been Elio’s; Elio’s new bedroom is right next door. The chink in the wall is a shared bathroom, whose vulgarity comically subverts the film’s grandiose and starkly bourgeois surface. Bodily humor serves to remind us that, no matter one’s income or level of education, all human beings—while capable of such great things as love—eat, excrete, get poorly timed nosebleeds and even use peaches to achieve orgasm (more on that last one in a moment). The film simultaneously elevates and grounds the human experience, and it uses romantic divides—the lover’s eternal hesitancy, the hummingbird’s struggle to stay afloat as it hovers above its sought-after flower—to do so.

Elio and Oliver are also separated by screens of their own making: their opaque sunglasses. These sunglasses perfectly represent the fault in self-imposed walls: they block one from being seen, but they also block one from seeing fully.

Elio’s mother—one of the few cinematic forces bringing the lovers together—recites a fable to both Elio and Oliver. In this fable, a timid knight courts a princess and, in a moment of courage, the knight asks her if it is better to speak or die. Elio asks Oliver if he has heard the story; Oliver says that he has and asks Elio how it ends; Elio tells him that the implicit meaning of the knight’s question goes unnoticed by the princess. Then, in a conversation fraught with heavy pauses, Elio and Oliver enact their own version of the story. Elio speaks of the many things that he still does not know and Oliver responds with silence. The two are at opposite ends of a statue and, as they walk about it, their vision of one another is obscured. When the two meet at the other end—sunglasses on—they still do not see each other. The underlying implication of Elio’s statement goes unacknowledged by Oliver, who ends the scene by demanding that they not speak of such things. How could they speak, under the weight of what was yet left unspoken?

The sunglasses, much like the shared bathroom, are employed to humorous effect; they serve as an example of a false machismo that both Elio and Oliver project. In the beginning, Elio responds to Oliver’s questions in an octave lower than what is comfortable for him to speak in and for the audience to hear; and Oliver responds to all of Elio’s advances by running away—not without first saying ‘later’—in ways that are hilariously unexpected and cruel. These machismo personae cause tragedy as well, as both Elio and Oliver engage in brief heterosexual romances to hide their affection from one another; in the aftermath, there is a heartfelt sequence where Marzia is rejected by Elio with a mere shrug—Marzia’s frustration echoes Dido’s lament: how many countless are hurt by misplaced love! The elevated story is again grounded, but this time by cowardice; these lovers are not perfect heroes, but flawed men. From beneath their masks, it is impossible for Elio and Oliver to see one another. After making his awkward declaration, Elio takes Oliver to a roadside stream, where physicality fulfills what words could not.

Up to this point, body language and behavioral nuances have let Elio and Oliver signal their feelings to one another in ways that they failed to verbally. The most salient example is their glancing touches, particularly Oliver’s giving Elio a backrub at the volleyball match. In the physical realm, one can act ambiguously, coyly deviating from social norms in ways that allow one to deny any such deviancies. When Elio first leads him to his new bedroom, Oliver yawns indiscreetly as they climb the staircase. Upon entering the room, Oliver suddenly and rudely plops himself face first on the bed. The camera shows only his downward-facing feet, but one gets the feeling that Oliver continues to watch Elio through half-shut eyes. At dinnertime, Elio wishes to speak to Oliver, but fears waking his newly arrived guest, that such an arousal would suggest a desire for companionship—Elio must not break from his persona of masculine indifference! Instead, Elio wakes Oliver in such a way that his aims can be denied; he loudly drops a book on the floor and proceeds to pick it up as Oliver wakes, creating the appearance of an accident.

These segments are only a few instances, but—while perhaps it may seem to be reading too far, since the film never confirms Elio’s and Oliver’s intentions, and since each moment is equivocal in its respective frame—the accumulation of such moments makes evident what had never been spoken. We later learn that Oliver’s backrub was a purposeful advance and that Elio’s parents—witnesses to the seduction as are the audience—were also aware of the lovers’ subdermal affection. It seems strange in retrospect that Elio could be so distraught, could constantly ask where Oliver was, without anyone questioning his behavior. The riddle is solved when one realizes that the tensions were palpable, their origins obvious, and that Elio’s friends and family did not need to question the apparent. Sometimes love seems most dubious to those, racked with fear, who are deepest in it.

When Elio takes Oliver to the roadside stream, their glasses are off and they finally see each other fully. The distance between them is closed by a sudden and impassioned kiss. In this scene, several disparate themes finally coalesce, much like the two lovers do. The first is one of the most ubiquitous in Guadagnino’s cinematography, and is borrowed from D.H. Lawrence and Heraclitus: freely flowing water. In novels like Women in Love, Lawrence explores swimming’s free-form movement as a metaphor for sexual fluidity. In Cosmic Fragments, Heraclitus posits the notion that one can never enter the same river twice, because the particles, as well as the person in them, will be different each time. Elio reads Oliver’s analysis of the river from Cosmic Fragments in an earlier scene; the river is symbolic for one’s relationship to the flow of time, as each moment of one’s life must be different from all its precedents. It is also worth noting that moving waters garner no bugs. A mosquito, a very persistent pest, follows Elio throughout the film, appearing whenever he has unwanted desire: the mosquito disappears when Elio and Oliver make their intentions known; it reappears in the finale, when Elio is left dejected by Oliver’s engagement. Elio’s sexuality, and his fear of it, constantly nags him. Later, when Elio uses the orifice of a de-pitted peach to achieve orgasm, the peach—an inanimate and genderless object—presents an intermediary point for the frightened Elio, who is caught between the persona he projects as Marzia’s lover and the person he feels he is as Oliver’s. When Oliver discovers the peach, Elio sheds shameful tears, wretchedly sobbing into the arms of the one who comforts him—vulnerable at last. But the idyllic stream carries none of this societal weight; there are no pests to disturb Elio, and the lovers remain free in its Eden.

The scene makes compelling, though subtle, statements about humanity’s relationship with nature as well as with private and public spaces. When they leave the stream, the camera keeps its verdant focus as Elio and Oliver fade into the distance. The shot is familiar to anyone with lush summer memories, and, left unfilled by the director, it leaves one to place one’s own childhood ebullience therein. In another scene, post coitus, the camera turns to an unmoving branch outside Elio’s bedroom. These shots connote an indifferent other—a blank backdrop to the events of the film; they assert that there exists a shared human experience to which the natural world bears silent testimony. They also connote a dichotomy of inner and outer, of self and other. Elio’s love occurs in private spaces—his bedroom and the quiet places where he likes to read—hidden away from the outside world. The effect of these spaces on Elio and Oliver’s personae is significant; they are unwilling to profess their love in the piazza by the statue, but acknowledge it by the isolated stream. However, Elio and Oliver begin to blur the demarcations between the inner and outer. Their love begins to blend their inner selves with the outer object of their affection; Elio wears Oliver’s necklace and shirt as a testament to this fact. This feeling, wherein the bonds of fear are broken by the attractive power of love, wherein one immerses oneself completely in the object of one’s affection, is the film’s titular theme: the lovers call each other by their own names.

At the end of the film, Elio’s broken-hearted visage—reflecting the flames of a lonely hearth fire—reminds us why we fear, why it is dangerous to love. As Freud so eloquently put it: “we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.” But then the words of Elio’s father also remind us that it is better to suffer for one’s bravery than to make others suffer for one’s cowardice—better to be Elio than Oliver. At the death of innocence, all we have are our sorrows, our remembrances of lost joy, but it is still better to have such sorrows than to have never felt such joy—better to live in love than fear.