Anyone who’s read or even heard about the 2007 André Aciman novel, the modern gay classic on which the movie is based, will see the peach and immediately know what’s coming: Elio absentmindedly digging at the peach’s flesh, carving a hole into it with his fingers before removing the pits, sticking his fingers inside, and getting an idea. Call Me b y Your Name, Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous, boyishly intellectual new romantic film, is the kind of movie to let a discovery like this play out at the natural pace of his characters’ curiosity. And what he knows, at this very moment, is that he wants to fuck a peach.Įven then, maybe “knows” is overstating it. What he knows is that, thanks to Oliver, something in him has been awakened. Elio, who has a girlfriend, is still figuring himself out. Oliver and Elio have lately become entangled in a romance-or something like that. This year, that student is a tall 24-year-old American man named Oliver (Armie Hammer), a statuesque discovery in his own right. His father, an archaeologist who studies ancient sculpture, has once again taken on a graduate student for the summer to help him catalog his findings.
This has been a season of self-discovery for Elio. Shall we start with the peach? Somewhere in Northern Italy, on a sun-drenched summer afternoon in 1983, a 17-year-old American Italian boy named Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a peach at his side.