When I bought the ticket and walked into the theater, I was actually a little surprised that an old man who looked like a well-dressed professor had already taken my seat. I found another seat myself, I believe I should have taken someone else's seat too. However, in fact, isn't watching a movie just to temporarily exchange identities with people in consciousness?
The opening title is a lively piano piece, and the picture is pictures of various Greek bronze sculptures, typewriters, cigarettes, sheet music, and so on. These things give hints to the setting of the movie. When the piano pieces come to an end, as an audience, you are suddenly thrown into an Italian summer.
The boy Elio was shirtless and stuck his head out of the upstairs window. Oliver, a 24-year-old American student, came to help Elio's father with archaeological research. Elio, a small music prodigy who likes to read, has nothing in common with the tall Oliver at first glance. Elio led Oliver upstairs and said to Oliver with a touch of resentment: "My room is now your room." A kind of prophecy for the whole movie.
In southern Italy, where physical contact is common and kissing each other on the cheek as a greeting, Elio and Oliver do not intend to avoid intimacy. As soon as they enter Elio's room, Oliver immediately lies on Elio's bed, knowingly or not. With a seduction (temptation), Elio found that when Oliver was still asleep, he didn't call him directly, let alone wake him up with his hands, but chose to pretend that he accidentally dropped a book, Wakes up Oliver. When the movie is over, you kind of feel like Oliver is pretending
to be asleep. You can feel them as two objects revolving around each other, attracting each other, but detaching from each other because of the rotation.
Elio has a "girlfriend" Marzia, and Oliver also has a very quick relationship with a local girl. But this complex relationship makes you feel that it is all very simple. Elio found himself drawn more and more to Oliver, albeit with some resentment. "I think Oliver is a little arrogant," he said to his parents. He surreptitiously observed Oliver, sneaking into Oliver's room and masturbating.
They got closer and closer, and once in the square in front of the post office, Elio confessed to Oliver. Oliver hinted Elio not to develop like this, he said to Elio "I want to be good." (I want to be a good person). Anyway, this sentence made me feel very moved. This sentence sums up the dilemma of the relationship between the two. There is nothing wrong with the emotion itself, but it starts with the shackles of worldly morality. And just like that, it's implied in the film that Oliver starts to deliberately distance himself from Elio because Elio keeps asking "Where is Oliver?" Really like a first love boy.
Finally one day Elio couldn't help but slip a note from the door to Oliver. And Oliver's way of replying to the letter was just leaving the note with the reply on his desk, which shows that he knows everything and knows that Elio often comes to his room. Oliver asked Elio to come to his room in the middle of the night. Although Elio was with Marzia during the day and even had sex with Marzia, he was always thinking of Oliver. It was in the middle of the night that Elio and Oliver had sex. Oliver said to Elio "Call me by your name, and I will call you by mind."
As a viewer, you can almost feel the temperature of their feelings with the back of your hand, and even feel ashamed for your voyeurism. Such a beautiful feeling between them belongs to them. What am I looking at?
I think the most beautiful thing about the film is that it makes heterosexuals try to understand the nature and dilemma of their relationship, making people feel that there is nothing to be ashamed of about what they are doing sneakily. In the next, they began to be inseparable, almost sticking together. They are more dependent on each other, both emotionally and physically.
Finally, it was time for Oliver to leave. It was explained at the beginning of the film that Oliver was only here to help temporarily. The film begins by telling the audience that everything is unsustainable.
Elio should have also dared not have eternal expectations for all this like the audience from the beginning. Fortunately, Elio's father, who already knew about Elio and Oliver's relationship, deliberately arranged for Oliver to travel together to Bergamo before returning to the United States.
After returning, my father talked to Elio. This is my favorite part of the whole movie. His father said he knew their relationship and was actually very happy for them. He confessed that he also had such a relationship when he was young, but unfortunately he did not have enough courage to face it. He hopes that Elio can find happiness in the current pain, because this kind of love between them is very precious and rare.
I can't repeat exactly what my father said in the movie, but it goes like this in the novel:
"Look,' he interrupted. 'You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough . But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”
“I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain."
Summer is over and winter has begun.
The Jewish festival of Hanukkah is here. Oliver called. Elio said that he missed him very much, but got the news that Oliver was engaged. Elio began to weep over the fire in the fireplace as the family was busy preparing a sumptuous Hanukkah dinner. It was like that for a long time. Someone called "Elio". Elio turned his head. At the end of the video. We, like Elio, hope that it's not Elio's mother, but Oliver.
From start to finish you don't feel any difference between the two boys' romance and their straight first love.
Of course, when I was watching the movie, I always sighed in the setting of this southern Italy, where my father is an archaeologist. The Greco-Roman tolerance and even advocacy of gay sex, as well as the worship of male nudity, can bring the audience to a certain spiritual height from the beginning. The relationship between a strong, tall, wise man and a beautiful boy is simple, but not as mundane and tragic as the same-sex relationships in "Brokeback Mountain" and "Moonlight". Like Greek mythology, like the praised flesh and beauty, to a certain extent, the setting is far away from the hustle and bustle, and it makes the most sincere part of human nature detached, sad but with a kind of warmth, just like the film is done in the fireplace at the end. Former Elio.
"Elio?"
*This film review was also published on Tencent's must-see app's New Film Research Institute
View more about Call Me by Your Name reviews
