Call Me By Your Name (2017)

directed by Luca Guadagnino

Juliet Brown

There is this face that Timothée Chalamet’s Elio Perlman makes about halfway through Call Me By Your Name; lovelorn, with a silver Star of David necklace in his mouth. It’s the face of a person who is so hopelessly wrapped around another’s finger. It is the face you make when the object of your affections is hurting you, and you have no choice but to let them. It’s a face in which hopelessness and a microscopic remaining sliver of hope coexist, like oil and water. It’s the face of limerence at its most excruciating. I know that face. I have worn that face.

This face was the first thing that really struck me about the film; the thing that pierced me, and led directly to all subsequent (innumerable) viewings. Until then, I was watching a 17-year-old boy struggle with his sexuality Somewhere in Northern Italy, but watching Elio make that face (while Sufjan Stevens’s “Futile Devices” played achingly in the background), it suddenly felt as though I was watching myself. I suppose it is worthwhile to mention that I was experiencing maybe the worst heartache of my life-to-date at the time; an 18-year-old girl struggling with love (and the lack thereof) Somewhere in South Jersey. I was just as hopelessly wrapped around another’s finger. They were hurting me and I couldn’t do anything but let them. Elio’s face, and all of the emotions that it captured, mirrored mine. Someone in love; someone suffering in love; someone hog-tied to the railroad tracks of love. The universal look of yearning & despair.

*

One time, when I was thirteen, my first real boyfriend broke up with me. By text. In the middle of my dance recital. I read it in the dressing room between numbers on my mom’s blue sliding-keyboard AT&T cell phone that she let me borrow, because I didn’t have my own. I bawled in the bathroom as my best friend tried to salvage my costume makeup with paper towels and words of consolation. This took place just a few days after our eighth grade formal, for which he had bought me a very pretty corsage; white roses with the petal tips painted baby blue (to match my shoes). It was still in the fridge. I was saving it. Upon returning home from the recital, I grabbed a pair of scissors and hacked it to pieces over the trash can. My dad patted my shoulder and said “good job.” (You couldn’t know, but that meant a lot coming from him.) My mom and my sister took turns sharing the responsibility of holding me as I cried. My best friend let me talk her ear off about it, until one day I ran out of things to say. My loved ones helped me through it.

Later, when I was eighteen, a guy who never wanted to call himself my boyfriend broke my heart repeatedly: each and every time he’d kiss me in his car late at night and then act like he barely knew me the next day when the sun was up and people were around. I may not have had to perform contemporary jazz choreography with a bunch of other thirteen year olds to Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love” with mascara-tear-stained cheeks this time around, but still, it was so much worse. It was worse because this time, nobody knew—it wasn’t exactly the sort of situation I wanted anyone to know about. And there was no one there to comfort me. And there wasn’t even a memento in a plastic box in the fridge to cathartically eviscerate, because he never bought me any flowers. It was a suffocatingly lonely time. It happened, however, to overlap with the release of Call Me By Your Name: a movie where the protagonist was just as alone in his heartbreak as I was. I watched as Elio fell victim to a forbidden love, one that he couldn’t tell anyone about. I watched as he scrawled in his little brown notebook the thoughts and feelings he was choking on, only to tear the pages out and crumble them into a ball, hating himself for feeling so much. I watched as he tossed and turned in bed at night, so full of longing that he looked like he might burst. I watched him suffer all the same pain I was suffering, and suddenly I didn’t feel so alone.

*

And while Elio was certainly my greatest sympathizer, it was actually a line of his father’s that spoke to me most. There I was, broken hearted, miserable, wishing more than anything that I could erase the boy responsible for my heartache from my brain entirely, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style, when Mr. Perlman decided to drop some of the most poignant elder wisdom I had ever heard:

“...if there is pain, nurse it. And if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out. Don’t be brutal with it. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster, that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything ― what a waste!”

I was dumbfounded. I had never needed to hear anything more in my life. When I was fourteen and dealing with grief much too big for my young heart to handle (and missing too many days of school because of it) a guidance counselor told me something very similar: if there is pain, don’t fight it, just let yourself feel it. It seemed so dumb at the time. I resented him for getting paid to give kids such lousy advice. But then hearing essentially those same words (albeit more eloquently put) on the big screen years later, I realized that the counselor had been right all along. It is our instinct to hide from the pain: to ignore it, to repress it, to drown it with whatever vices necessary. But if you don’t allow yourself to feel it, you’ll never heal. You’ll be forever on the run from something that will never stop chasing you. And beyond that, like Mr. Perlman said: what a waste! What a waste to try and make yourself feel nothing, when there is all that raw emotion to be felt. I will always be of the “tis better to have loved and lost” camp, and because of this, and because of both Mr. Perlman and the counselor’s words, I’ve come to realize something about heartbreak: it may hurt like hell, but it is a necessary pain.

*

Toward the end of the movie, Elio calls his mother from Albergoni and asks to be picked up from the station after witnessing his first love board a train and ride straight out of his life. On the drive back to Crema, he sobs, losing his grip on the silent and stubborn stoicism with which he has handled all of the pain until that moment. Watching this, I also sobbed. For Elio. For myself. Again at the whispered “Elio––Elio Elio Elio Elio Elio Elio Elio Elio.” / “Oliver. I remember everything”’ exchange, again at the fireplace scene, again after the final credits rolled and I was left alone to process all that I had witnessed in the past two hours. I was crying because it hurt, sure, but I was also crying because I was just so thankful that someone made this movie. That even if Elio wasn’t real, the fact that this movie and its story and message existed meant that at some point in time, someone’s heart was in the same sorry condition as my own, and I can’t explain what a gift that was: to discover that I wasn’t nearly as alone as I felt.

*

I have seen Call Me By Your Name many times now, each time stinging just as much as the last. A good sting, though. You know, the kind that makes you want to listen exclusively to Sufjan Stevens for days after. And despite the fact that I’ve got each line, scene, and facial expression burned into my brain, none of it ever loses meaning. I could watch this movie every day for the rest of my life and it would never lose its ability to make me feel everything I felt the first time I saw it. Granted, I’m not going to watch it every day for the rest of my life, but I will watch it often. And I will continue talking about it to anyone who will listen. And I will die on the hill that everyone should spare two hours of their lives and see it at least once.

Juliet Brown lives in New Jersey, where she reads, writes, and rewatches her favorite movies way more often than she watches new ones. She currently works at a Starbucks and a camera shop to offset her coffee and film development costs while trying to find a way to make a living out of the rest.