Gerald Rascionato | Call Me by Your Maid / 2018

what’s wrong with this picture?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Rennie (screenplay), Gerald Rascionato (director) Call Me by Your Maid / 2018 [5 minutes]

 

Gerald Rascionato’s Call Me by Your Maid of 2018 is quite fair-minded and hilarious satire on the successful gay film of 2017, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name.

     Besides hiring a foreign exchange student to help him out each summer, Professor Perlman (James Lemaire) and his wife Annella (Laura Elizabeth Hall) also hire a maid (Mafalda), who tells the story of the feature movie romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) about Guadagnino's film with a much more heterosexually normative perspective.

     She is aghast, primarily, by the fact that her employer selects his assistants by a photograph she holds up for us to see that might be more appropriate for a position as a gay gogo dancer than an educational research assistant. Meeting his new assistant, Mr. Perlman suggests he’s much bigger that he looked in his photo, hinting at the man’s endowments, not his bodily frame.

       The moment that the father introduces his new assistant Oliver (Richard Rennie) to his son Elio (Tate Dewey), telling him that he’s my baby, no actually he’s 16; she is equally troubled by the fact that the new assistant puts his arm around Elio’s neck and kisses him on both cheeks, Mafalda, forced to carry the numerous bags, reminding us something to the effect, “you do remember that he’s just introduced the boy as being 16?”

        By the next morning at breakfast the two, speaking now in Italian, are greeted with “You two look well rested. You must of have needed it.”

        “It’s just so comfortable with Oliver,” Elio responds in German, Oliver answering in French: “It’s two hard to get out of bed when I’m with you.” The parents laugh heartily as Mafalda flips quickly through her translation guides, arguing that they’re all so “fucking pretentious.”

         Mafalda picks peaches, wondering how they can possibly eat all of these, and anyone who has seen the original film well knows what’s coming next.

         Meanwhile, Oliver shows up in red bicycling shorts ready to join Elio on a bike journey where we also know ends in the two finding some deep pleasure in one another. But Mafalda is more disturbed that he hasn’t washed his shorts in two weeks, and is grossed out when she opens Elio’s bedroom door to find him with the shorts pulled over his head, breathing in deeply the smell of Oliver’s groin. Mafalda briefly tries it and is totally disgusted.

       Oliver and Elio lie side by side in the next frame, Oliver whispering “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” but when Elio tries it, it becomes rather confusing since he suggests he call him by his name and he’ll call him by his. Who is Oliver and Elio remains undetermined. And just as in the original movie makes utterly so sense.

        When Malfalfa passes by, hearing the boys whispering, she puts a cup up to the door. But suddenly it opens, with Oliver totally naked, perhaps from her reaction, with an erection. Elio appears behind him, equally naked, biting on a peach. The later infuriates her more than anything else. ‘You can fuck with their son, but don’t fuck with my peaches,” she declares to herself.

         And soon she discovers dozens of half peaches inexplicably under their bed, which she gathers up, trying to comprehend that they have been doing with them, but knows it must be something unspeakable.

         At another moment, lying beside a small pool, Oliver rolls in, Malfalfa rushing to the rescue, with Oliver pushing her aside when Elio has not been the one to come to his help.

         Soon they are saying goodbye, Oliver and Elio facing one another in a near kiss. The Perlmans hope to see him again very soon, whole Malfalfa hands them a bowl of the rotten peaches she’s found under their bed.

        The phone rings and, of course, it’s Oliver calling to tell Elio that he’s getting married. While the Perlman’s shout out Happy Hanukkah, Elio breaks down into tears, Malfalfa deeming that it’s time to leave this insane family, taking the distraught Elio with her.

        As much as I enjoyed the originally movie, this satire punches the rather bizarre events of the original with near perfect blows, reminding us that Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name took a great many strange turns that many if not most Americans would not all find as easily assimilable and felicitous as the LGBTQ community viewed the movie. One might argue Rascionato’s short film, in all good spirits, was “made” to show something was wrong with that picture, namely that it didn’t even try to take the average American values into account. But that, of course, was its charm, its hutzpah, the reason for its success.

 

Los Angeles, July 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).