two versions of a love
affair
by Douglas Messerli
One of the biggest surprise hits of 2017 was Luca Guadagnino’s Call
Me by Your Name, budgeted at 3.4 million dollars, while taking in worldwide
41.9 million, making it the third highest grossing SONY film of the year. The
film received almost universally positive reviews, although there was a great
deal of criticism of the age differences between Chalamet’s character and
Hammer’s adult male. Many critics saw it as a predatory situation. But The
Advocate nicely pointed out that it was not significantly different from
many heterosexual films such as Gone with the Wind, in which Scarlett
was a teenager in love with the 33-year-old Rhett Butler. Of course, in today’s
reactionary environment that movie, were it to be new, might also draw hostile
reactions. Over the last decades we have descended into an age of new sexual
“puritanism,” which, of course, the satire that follows my discussion of the
original film, evinces.
Los Angeles, July 14, 2023
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (July 2023).
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