Call Me By Your Name: Desire of the Self

Later!

The summer heat creates a blanket of security, a safety net to allow oneself to be vulnerable. It makes us raw and unguarded, like we’ve been cut wide open from head to toe and all our insides are out on display for everyone to see. Summer gives an excuse for this kind of behavior, making it acceptable to be half naked and sunkissed and in love. 

Call Me By Your Name uses this excuse to heighten emotions and saturate its world with feeling. Set in the middle of an Italian summer, the heat creates an atmosphere of content stagnancy, philosophical research, and mid-morning naps on the couch. Oliver, the 24 year old student of Elio’s father, lives with Mr. Perlman and his family while he works on his dissertation and takes in the beauty of small town Crema, Italy. The back and forth between Elio and Oliver simmers slowly over the six weeks he is there. Unknown intentions create a sly play between the two, so as not to upset the other, disrupting their eventual circular dynamic.

There is an air of vulnerability throughout the world of Call Me By Your Name, bribing the characters of the world to become vulnerable themselves. Familia sit around a table, usually a small one outside, knee to knee, with a feast laid out in front of them. Slightly unbuttoned shirts and half sipped drinks decorate the arrangement. Passing of plates and spices. Friends gather to play volleyball, with swimsuits still soaked from a swim at the lake, or gather around a piano while someone plays. These activities give way to wavered defenses, each one playing out like a memory steeped in nostalgia. It is warm and the trees are alive, everything feels like a moving painting. It is the perfect catalyst for a transformative coming of age. This aura of comfortability is the simmering start to Elio and Oliver’s romance.

I know nothing, Oliver

Elio, whose mood changes depending on the colored swimming shorts Oliver wears for the day, is fickle. He’s a typical 17 year old whose evenings are spent swimming in the lake, dancing in a crowd, and reading music in the backyard of their villa. He suppresses his desire for Oliver by being cold, harsh, insinuating he is arrogant with his curt use of “Later!” But he only does this so as not to give himself away and draw attention to how enticed he is by Oliver’s presence. He is captivated by Oliver’s sense of self, the way he can be so calm and subtle with no second guessing in sight, something Elio tends to do continuously. He knows where he belongs in the world and plays the part of his role. Elio’s finicky behavior is rooted in uncertainty in himself. We see this in the way he looks at himself in the mirror, and puts on an air of confidence around Oliver, talking about girls, exacerbating his experiences within his own world to appear confident so as to impress Oliver, leveling up to him in some way, but Elio cannot help but let his innate wonder and curiosity escape, oftentimes without notice. With his parents' quiet encouragement, and the love that fills his summer home; Anchise, Mafalda, and the local families living amongst them, the atmosphere of his world urges him out. It is within him no matter how much he tries to hide it in front of Oliver, it is within him when he mocks Oliver playfully, when he runs to meet Marzia after getting in late, and when he smirks knowing he is lying about what he’s thinking about on his swim with Oliver.

Oliver, who sees this lifestyle of the Perlman’s and the fluid manner in which Elio moves about, envies this. Not in a way of anger or jealousy, but a slow burning desire to have it himself. He loves everything Elio is because Elio is everything Oliver will never get to be in his own lifetime. It’s this that attracts the two. The desires of the self, that what you desire also desires you.

The romance that transpires between them is indicative of their respective worldviews and perception of each other. The aforementioned summer heat allows them to melt into each other for their last remaining weeks, riding bikes to town, transcribing music, writing, studying, discovering sculptures, and meeting at midnight. Being friends, brothers, family, and lovers. But there is a saturation of sadness, of impending grief, mixing with the heightened raw emotions of desire.

It is only once the two intertwine that their anxieties rise to the surface. Oliver, once confident, is now stricken with grief over the life he will never be able to pursue. Elio, who’s used to living with his heart on his sleeve is now forced to face the grief and heartache of losing a first love.

This desire of self brings about a coming of age for the two, while for entirely different reasons, their realizations and growth mirror each other, almost in an attempt to be closer to and embody the other. They both have a subtle realization that the world they are entering is not one of the comforts they grew up familiar with. And the humility shared in these short last weeks cannot escape this world. Oliver must go back to the states, finish his school, wed, and have children, as he has always been expected to. He speaks to Elio of his jealousy over the Perlman’s closeness, stating that he never was able to be himself with his parents as Elio is. At the train station, we see the two saying their final goodbye, with no words, with Elio now wearing the shirt, “Billowy,” that Oliver once arrived in. It is this subtle change that shows us how deeply they have intermingled.

What a Waste!

Mr. Perlman reveals that he too had what Elio and Oliver felt. A sense of complete open rawness with someone else. He says it’s rare, happening only once in some people’s lives, and that it is not a thing to shove away or bury. But to embrace it and feel everything there is to feel with a love like this. Use it to navigate the world, and don’t shy from it because before you know it the opportunity will long disappear, and so too, you and I, Elio and Oliver, and everyone we know. So Elio is left with his desire, now changed to longing, a sense of emptiness, and a chance to embrace the change this Summer romance brought about.

The truest lesson they shared was their ability to become vulnerably open. To risk becoming undone as one person and built back up speckled with another’s language. They found themselves in each other, selves they hadn’t known existed yet, selves that hadn’t been explored, built up from their old wreckage, just like the statues from the harbor, with fractured pieces of the other speckled in.

In a sense, Elio and Oliver were the same person, meeting at different intervals of life, forever changing the others course of action and aligning them closer to the desires they held onto. Elio taught Oliver what it was like to be truly himself, open to his impulses and authenticity. And Oliver showed Elio how to give himself fully, living in the moment, sitting with his feelings, and being okay with them. I like to think that they took pieces of each other with them, ways of acting, schools of thinking, expressions, emotions. They leave each other completely changed, forever altered by the summer they spent together, now with desire dormant within them.

I remember everything.

In the final scenes of Call Me By Your Name, its winter and the once luscious green villa is now blanketed with snow, a soft aura of white surrounds the lakes and trees creating a comforting cold. Elio sits by the fire and contemplates the phone call he just received, one where Oliver says he’s getting married. The memories and warmth of Summer come rushing back to him, remembering everything about those days spent together in the heat.