Matt Lambert | Heile Gänsje (Heal, Goose) / 2013

i would be happy if i never left this room again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Blake Wood and Matt Lambert (screenplay), Matt Lambert (director) Heile Gänsje (Heal, Goose) / 2013 [13 minutes]

 

Heal, Goose, which calls up a German song about childhood, a group of Berlin youths discuss their sexual lives, both gay and heterosexual, living in group housing. But the central figure, Max Gass, despite or perhaps because of the general fluidity of sex is still confused. He is highly attracted to both his female friend, Emme Preisler, and his gay friend Malik Blumenthal, and suffers in the shifts of his own imagination and actualization of sex.

   By the end of this short film, however, he finds complete satisfaction by realizing he is a true bisexual who enjoys a sexual rendezvous with both his female and male friend simultaneously.

     This is not a particularly profound film; most of these kids simply jabber on about their sexual exploits and realizations that everyone around them, in their endlessly partying world, are sexually engaged. But it certainly gives us a sense of youthful angst and the sweaty sexual world that many a young person endures in contemporary life.

     I would have loved to have a moment of true discovery of what made up the dreams and personal imaginations of these beautiful young persons, but Lambert is interested only in their bodies, their sexual desires and experiences. Well, this is what is basic in youth, isn’t it? Five years from now, perhaps we might go back and ask them what they were really about, what dreams they had other than the press of bodies, and what they might imagine in the future.

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

Victor Sjöström | Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage) / 1921, USA 1922

redemption

by Douglas Messerli

 

Victor Sjöström (screenwriter, based on the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, and director) Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage) / 1921, USA 1922

 

Swedish director Victor Sjöström’s 1921 silent film, The Phantom Carriage is an incredibly sophisticated film for its day. Not only do we get beautiful images of the seemingly invisible “death carriage,” the transference of souls out of bodies, and remarkable images of domestic violence, but

Sjöström employs an intelligent use of flashbacks to tell his story of a loving but generally drunken rascal, David Holm (performed by the director himself) and his forbearing wife, Anna (Hilda Borgström), as well as David’s brother (Einar Axelsson) and his best friend Georges (Tore Svennberg), all of whom Holm corrupts, along with destroying people with whom he comes in contact such as the Salvation Army worker, Edit (Astrid Holm), who has a complex relationship with Holm that stretches far into the past,  and who contracts consumption from him.

     In a large sense, Holm, who Edit tries to summon up as she is dying, is a symbol of contagion, moral and physical, a man who, unable to control himself personally, destroys almost all those around him, including his wife, brother, friend, and caring do-gooder. He is a force of destruction, even tearing out the patches Edit has spent the night stitching up in his torn clothing. Clearly for novelist Selma Lagerlöf, from whose novel this film was adapted, Holm, if in his drunken state is somewhat loveable, is also a harbinger of death and the perfect man to inherent his friend Georges’ dreadful position of “the phantom carriage” driver, which by legend falls to the first man who dies on the stroke of New Year’s midnight.

     Through the accident of a fight, Holm dies at that very moment, and in a kind of creaky dialogue between himself and Georges, relives some of his past which explains why he is now destined to become the driver of the “death machine,” akin to all the myths of the grim reaper. Yet, Edit’s own sense of guilt that she, innocently perhaps, has helped doom this soul—in part because of her

reintroduction of Holm to his wife—redeems him, particularly when it is discovered that Holm’s wife, now also ill with consumption, plans to murder her own children in order to protect them. It is only Holm who can now save his children, and it is his hopes of redemption that saves his own life—at least temporarily.

      In many respects Lagerlöf’s tale might remind us of a darker and deeper version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with its Christmas myth. Although the constantly drunken Holm is no Ebenezer Scrooge, his behavior is quite similar and his destruction of people’s lives far more widespread. But like Scrooge, it takes the spectre of his own death to make him realize the error of his ways, and, although we don’t actually observe him playing out his transformation, it is still the center of this film.

     For many young would-be filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, however, it was simply the myth and image of the phantom carriage that would haunt their imaginations. Those images appear quite specifically in Bergman’s The Wild Strawberries, but the concept of a contagion infecting the entire society appears in numerous Bergman works, including, obviously, The Seventh Seal and even later films such as Shame and The Passion of Anna. Bergman not only loved this film as a child but watched it almost annually over the years.

    Victor Sjöström’s early films in fact helped to build the later brilliant Swedish film industry. And his The Phantom Carriage is truly one of the very best.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2018).

 

Lukas Kacinauskas |As buvau Maksas (I Was Max) / 2022

night fright

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lukas Kacinauskas (screenwriter and director) As buvau Maksas (I Was Max) / 2022 [21 minutes]

 

Max (Sarunas Zenkevicius) gets in the car with Tadas (Matas Dirgincius), evidently an internet prearranged get together. They chat small talk, Max taking out from his bag a small box of chocolates he brought for his new “date.”

     Tadas is reassured by the fact that Max looks even better in personal than in did on the internet, although he thought he might be a bit taller. When he wonders if Max is blonde, he asks him to take his hat off. Max suggests, “Maybe later.” And Tadas reminds Max that he is only interested in LTR (Long-term relationships), which his behavior seems to deny, not even comprehending the acronym.

   Something is clearly wrong here we sense in the fact that Max hardly says anything, but answers in short phrases the questions Tadas puts to him nearly non-stop, but in a friendly manner. Is he from Vilnius, and if he indeed grew up in the same neighborhood as his grandmother, why did he never before encounter him? Max is a Russian name, Maxim. Is he Russian? And if he is half-Ukrainian as he claims, why doesn’t he know the difference between a phrase Tadas speaks in Russian and another word in Ukrainian?

      They decide to drive into nature, perhaps the famous woods outside of Vilnius, presumably to have sex. But Max barely speaks. Tadas opens a bottle of wine and must almost force it through his friend’s lips to relax him somewhat.

      They get out of the car to kiss and follow up with sex, and Max is great with the first kiss, but as Tadas moves to his neck, he insists he has to pee.

       Evidently he is gone for a long while as the film goes black and when it lights up again, Tadas is stilling back in the car. Returning Max admits that he had run, sped away from him and the potential sex which they were about to enact. He has a cut near his left eye, and Tadas, taking his emergency kit from his trunk, gently cares ministers the cut.

    Finally, it looks like Max would like to kiss him, if no other reason but express his thanks; but Tadas snaps back “forget it,” and suggests he will drive him back home.

       As they reach home they share a final smoke, strangely Max thanking him for the “good time,” as if anyone might describe the evening of tense silences and vague answers as being something someone might enjoy. And Tadas finally calls him out for his obvious fraud, calling him a fake. He argues that he’s a hot, good-looking guy, but yet everything about him is a deflection the truth. Doesn’t he ever get tired of it?

      Max admits he is indeed sick of his lies, of his inability to follow through apparently with his desires. “I’m trying my best,” he insists. But if this is his best, he must live most of his life still terribly closeted. Yet again, he thanks Tadas for a date, which strangely the evening for him has been. He has perhaps never before even attempted an internet date.

     As his “date” gets out of the vehicle he wishes Max well, but the boy turns back, leans into the window to finally announce his name is Lukas. Tadas appreciates the more honest name and then realizing what it has meant for his friend to have offered his true name adds, “Good for you.”

     Perhaps the gentle kindness that Tadas has shown his reluctant date will help Lukas in the future to be able to participate in the sexual act that he obviously is seeking. One wonders whether the author/director is hinting our Lukas is Ace, nonsexual? Certainly, that would put a far different perspective on the film, one with which, as I’ve expressed previously, I have little sympathy.

     Like Charlie of Joseph Biggerstoff’s film 17, he says, “I’m sorry.” But we recognize that Charlie will quickly overcome his reservations and soon perhaps even enjoy anal sex or seek other ways of finding sexual pleasure. Tyler, of the 2017 film, will perhaps that very night find the kind of boyfriend he is truly seeking. But with Lukas we are not certain. Such fears still held so late in his youth are hard to cast off. He couldn’t have found a better friend than Tadas, however, to help move him in the right direction. And others clearly would not been so beneficent.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).

    

 

 

Joseph Biggerstoff | 17 / 2022

not like the movies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Biggerstoff (screenwriter and director) 17 / 2022 [10.20 minutes]

 

This short film of about 10 minutes by Joseph Biggerstoff begins on a college campus, with the young unnamed hero Charlie (Matthew Boyd Moore) observing all his fellow students holding hands with girlfriends, one boy begging his forgiveness for accidentally touching his arm as he passes. Charlie is clearly locked of the world of the human sexual touch.

    At home, sharing dinner with his seemingly loving parents, Charlie is moody, refusing to eat, and begs to be allowed to return to his room for a homework assignment he needs to finish. Actually, what Charlie is completing is homework on a meet-up with a man he’s met on the internet. He shows the lower half of his body in his underwear to which the respondent answers “Nice undies. I’d like to see them on my floor tonight?” When the man asks if he’s “got pics,” Charlie, revealing his naiveté and his own internet interests, presumes the man means porno, and demurs “I don’t take nudes.” But all his internet communicator wants is a picture of his face, which he also describes as “adorable.” When he sees a full picture of the man with whom he’s communicating, Charlie can only express his reaction by saying “Wow, you’re hot.”

     They make an appointment to meet up at a local grocery store with his friend driving within an hour. In the meantime, it appears that the young boy is not totally clueless as he follows the internet instructions of a man explaining how to give oneself a douche. Clearly Charles expects to be fucked.

     When they meet—outside a store whose neon sign announces “Fresh Plus,” as if announcing the existence of the boy who is illuminated by its light—the man looks ever better in person, driving the now excited boy to his “new,” basically unfurnished apartment, where he puts on a movie, apparently mostly for the dramatic love music it contains, while the naïve boy says that he’s never seen the movie before, as  if they were about to watch it; the man admits he’s never seen it through before either. Charlie proceeds to ask him if he’s “out,” another sign that the man should have taken special care in handling his young would-be lover.

     But as the music picks up and swells to a crescendo, he falls upon Charlie’s seemingly ready and writhing body as if he were the kind of ready and responder lovers we see in romantic movies.

     In the very next frame, however, they seem to have finished they sexual act, the older man tossing the removed shorts—which indeed are on the floor—to the boy. Back in the car, we observe the boy holding back tears, turning to the man to say “sorry,” the other replying, “That’s fine,” and finally offering up his name, “Tom.” He holds his hand to shake the boy’s hand in reassurance, but Charlie quickly leaves the auto.”

      It appears that the pain of first-time anal intercourse may have been too much for him, or that he himself could not get an erection and ejaculate. Perhaps both occurred. We cannot know what the “sorry” fully expresses nor the impending tears, but clearly the evening has not gone for the young boy as he expected. Even feeling ready and desirous does not necessarily make result in the fulfillment that porno leads one to expect. Sex, at least this time, was not at all like it appears to be in the movies.

      This film reminds me of a strange occasion with one of Howard’s students in our early days of teaching. He called up and invited himself to our place. But when we sat down to talk, he moved ridiculously close to me, clearly seeking some sort of sexual activity. At first I was simply startled, and didn’t quite know what to do with the young man physically rubbing his leg against my thigh. But finally, both Howard and I, realizing that he was desperately seeking sexual activity, took him to our bed, undressed him, and began to caress him. But two males on either side of him, no matter how gently we were treating him, clearly scared him, and he quickly sat up in utter terror. We recognized immediately his fears, and attempted to calm him, assuring him that this is not what sexual activity is all about, that he would surely find the right situation for him. He quickly dressed and left. I don’t know whatever became of him, but this was surely not the right first experience for this young man, even if he had sought it out.

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2023).

Sam Langshaw | One Night Only / 2017

all dressed up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Langshaw (screenwriter and director) One Night Only / 2017 [11 minutes]

 

Living in a small suburb near Sydney, Australia, Tyler (Tom Mendes) and his best friend Erica (Ellen Wiltshire) glam it up, painting themselves with heavy make-up and dressing up in glittery frocks, as they plan a New Year’s trip to the city on the internet-invite presumably of a well-to-do Sydney businessman Theo (Tim May).

     The wide-eyed country boy and his female friend arrive at the adult party looking more than a bit freakish to the “sophisticated” partygoers. Theo meets his guest a little taken aback but nonetheless attracted to the young flesh Tyler represents.

     At one point in the party—a party in which Erica and Tyler feel quite out of place with the older, more-subdued celebrants—Theo suggests his new “friend” meet him upstairs in the bedroom. Tyler is excited to possibly began a relationship with this handsome older man, but at the same time is somewhat dismayed for the response they’ve so far received. But when, after a few kisses, his new would-be lover suggests he go the bathroom and wash away his eye make-up, revealing that he’s not “into femmes,” Tyler grabs his bestie and quickly escapes the event.

     The young boy is understandably distressed about the situation, the evening having lost all of its joyfulness through the word “femme” thrown at him as it probably has been for most of his young life. Even today many gay men shutter at extremely feminine versions of themselves; and I too have done so in the past. In a world that still awards men for being masculine, a great number of gay men have been schooled to enjoy the very traits that heterosexual couples most prefer, obvious sexual distinctions between the masculine and feminine, increasingly over the last several decades is something that has been somewhat worn away by younger generations.

     Standing on a bridge, metaphor of where these two outsiders—both culturally and sexually—have arrived at in their lives, they encounter a group of younger celebrants also glammed up, but with less stellar results. The new group invites the two to join them, a young femme boy, who looks similar to Tyler, eyeing him for a possible new sexual encounter.

     This film by University of Sydney film student Sam Langshaw was released soon after his first film, Amsterdam, another film about outsiders who find one another in a most unlikely party. Langshaw went on to work for Warner Brothers Australia and recently has moved to London where he works as a script reader and developer.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2023

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

Douglas Messerli | Not Ready for Prime Time / 2023

not ready for prime time

by Douglas Messerli

 

A young man has come to terms with his sexuality and is ready to explore a same-sex experience. How does he go about it, particularly when he is still high school and lives with parents or is not yet acquainted with the gay scene, and just still uncomfortable about the whole experience? In a world of warehouse size techno-dance clubs that have replaced many of the previous intimate neighborhood gay bars, many of the latter of which have now become equally popular with interested heterosexuals, a bar—which once served as almost private gathering spots for gays and lesbians—is now often not the first option. And increasingly, in a computer-run world wherein the young man or woman has already first encountered gay or lesbian porno, the internet is the first place where the young LGBTQ person might look to make a date.

    But as we have learned from various films I’ve reviewed over the years this is not always a safest place for a young person seeking his or her first sexual contact. One need only remind oneself of what happened to the young boy seeking out sexual contact through internet contact in Venezuelan filmmaker Carlos Alejandro Molina’s Rojo (Red) of 2013, where the young man meets up with the man who by arrangement has been dressed in red, who turns out to be his own father; or, even worse, the catfishing that Diego, the hero of French director Luca Morales’ Rendez-vous avec Diego (Date with Diego) (2021) had to endure, finally meeting up with an older man who he thought was a boy of his own age with whom he had begun to fall in love.

      But even when nothing dire or cruel happens, as in the case of the three films I discuss below, the first love, these young men’s first full sexual experience, leaves much to be desired, unprepared as they are for their companion’s experience and their presumed assumptions about their own experience. In all three films I’ve chosen to demonstrate this newly-developing genre—Australian director Sam Langshaw’s One Night Only (2013), US director Joseph Biggerstaff’s 17 (2022), and Lithuanian moviemaker Lukas Kacinauskas’ As buvau Maksas (I Was Max) also of 2022—their pre-arranged dates were with good looking a basically friendly strangers, but the experience hurtful and even terrorizing in part because of their own inexperience. As I have written previously about other such young people in the process of coming out, an experienced older man might have mentored them more slowly into the process, or if they had been able to meet someone closer to their age with whom they might have clumsily explored the new territory together would have been far better’ but unfortunately in a world in which such encounters are still have furtive and forbidden by often unknowing and unaccepting parents, young people don’t have a great many choices, resulting in an unfortunate first sexual encounter—not so very different, when I think about it, from my own first such experience with an older, heavy-set male who nonetheless showed me that I was finally ready for sex, just not with him.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

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).

 

 

Luca Guadagnino | Call Me by Your Name / 2017

an affair to remember

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Ivory (screenplay, based on a fiction by André Aciman), Luca Guadagnino (director) Call Me by Your Name / 2017

 

Certainly, the most romantic film in the least romantic year of my memory, 2017, was Luca Guadagnino’s gay love story, Call Me By Your Name. Yet this gay-centered film was not quite like any other coming of age films. Unlike many a “coming-out” tale, the young 17-year-old figure upon which this work centers, Elio Perlman (the absolutely stunning young actor Timothée Chalamet), is not only already “seeing” girls near the Lombardy villa in which he lives with his intellectually-inclined family, but having sex with the local girl Marzia (Esther Garrel). Yet in the summer of 1983, something clicks that sends him into a kind of spin—and we never quite know whether it is a permanent or only a temporary shift.

     His sudden transition into sexual change and a kind of early sexual maturity has to do with the introduction into his quiet family life of one of his father’s brilliant students, Oliver (the always handsome Armie Hammer). Oliver suddenly appears, usurping for six weeks the boy’s own bedroom, like one of the bronzed gods out of his father’s anthropological studies. The moment the two lock eyes on one another, fireworks nearly go off.

      Yet the attraction between the two is slow in developing in this overly languid film, scripted by the long important writer-director James Ivory (based on a fiction by André Aciman (who also plays a minor figure in the film). Despite their immediate lust for one another, both are more than precocious figures, Oliver seemingly knowing besides his Greek and Roman history, the etymology of the languages, and even daring to contradict his professor’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) observations about root words. For his part, Elio is a bookish genius, who not only skillfully plays the piano (in real life as well as on screen), and spouts facts about the local monuments that one could hardly imagine a 17-year-old could have ever been aware—in 1983, one must remember, there were no computers and cell-phones to distract young intelligence—and who, moreover, speaks fluent Italian, English, and French (which the real-life actor does as well). In many ways the two were destined to come together intellectually if not physically.

     Understandably, the 30-some Oliver is cautious around this genius boy, not wanting to introduce him into a sexual event which might harm him or simply confuse his own sexuality. And then, as we discover at film’s end, Oliver, has had a long relationship with a woman back home in the good ole USA, and perhaps he is not quite sure of his sexual identification. Oddly, and quite wonderfully, the film recognizes the sexual fluidity of most of the human race, and doesn’t judge their sudden attraction. But Oliver’s clear moral resistance also demonstrates his caring, and perhaps already his love and admiration for the younger boy.

      Much of the film, accordingly spends its energy on the flirtatious encounters between the two, subtle messages to one other, such as Oliver’s hand placed just perhaps a few too many moments on Elio’s arm, gentle looks of furtive attraction, which remind one very much of Ivory’s Forester recreation, Maurice, and, most importantly long bicycle trips with one another into the countryside, along with painful attempts by Oliver to make clear that he might also be available to local women.

      If all of this, at first, frustrates Elio, particularly Oliver’s Americanized phrase suggesting his stand-offish position, “Later,” a signature of moving on while postponing any action. And the young boy cannot seemingly abide the new intruder. But both the elder and the audience know better, as the kid begins to develop a near fetishistic relationship with the man with whom he must share a bathroom, sneaking into his room to smell his shirt and swimming suit. And, gradually, as the two continually circle around one another, and with the help of a tale his mother reads him from the German about a prince who could bring himself to speak of his love for a princess, Elio elliptically expresses his feelings to Oliver, who briefly responds with a kiss or two, but suggests that since they have done nothing to consummate their desires, they should go no further, particularly to protect his young friend.

    Fortunately, for both, the standoff finally comes to an end when Oliver invites the boy into his bedroom late at night, where the two consummate their absolute passion for one another with an emotional release with which anyone who has ever fallen in love can only sympathize. 

     The previous tensions might have almost been unbearable, and still, in part, are, were it not for set designer Violante Visconti di Modrone’s total attention to details, the books, kitchen, dining room, and hearth-lit scenes that give this world it’s sensuality, along with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s ability to capture the lazy sunlit world of Crema and other villages in Lombardy. The scenery and internal spaces are even more romantic perhaps that the plot of the film and give Guadagnino’s work a kind of solidity which the furtive characters cannot. It almost asks, “How can people not fall in love in such a loveable world?”

     Not that, once these two have finally been able to come together, there isn’t plenty of hot romance as both boy and man literally jump out of their pants to express the ecstasy they feel about one another’s bodies and emotional expressions. Why couldn’t we have come together earlier, Elio implores, knowing that soon his lover will have to return to the US. It’s the plea of every lover in every sensitive portrayal of love. Fortunately, Elio’s parents, who both are clearly aware of their son’s new infatuation and are totally accepting of it, suggest that the two of them go together for a couple of weeks to a northern town where Oliver plans to do research.

     We suspect that Oliver finds little time for his research, given their near-idyllic and, frankly, soap-opera ad-like rush through the villages and local mountains, where they kiss and hug, and dance through the hills and streets with complete abandonment. We forgive them and even the director for their sentimentality, for they will never again have the opportunity of that rush of love.

      And that is the true tragic lesson of this beautiful film. As Oliver stoically takes the train to go off from his very special summer, the young Elio attempting the best he possibly can to keep from utterly breaking-down we are reminded of all those films that sent lovers off in different directions—or, at least, proposed to do so: Casablanca, Love in the Afternoon (even though, at the very last moment, Hepburn is swept up into her lover’s arms), or even Deborah Kerr and Carey Grant in An Affair to Remember (does it matter that she might have left their magic voyage in a taxi or subway instead?). The seemingly balanced and wiser-than-his-years Elio tearfully phones up his mother to come take him home. After my first love revealed he had made a choice to begin a relationship with another, I did the very same thing, standing in a no-longer existent phone booth on a New York street to call my parents for a plane ticket to take me home.

     The most profound moment of this sad romance is when Elio’s father invites him to sit beside him and attempts to explain that instead of trying to forget his first-love experience, tamping it down to something regrettable, that he should celebrate the special love that each had shared with one another, that life itself would slowly offer choices that would steal away those very joys that his son had so wonderfully experienced. Keep those memories close, he suggests, as he hints that he too might have gone through such a transitional love, but chose instead to keep it at a distance, to move away from it, without ever re-discovering the joys it might have provided him. Such openness of heart and perception is worth every somewhat silly movie of this sort of April-August romance, which could be described of my potential relationship as well.

     A telephone call from Oliver, apparently months later, reveals to Elio that his lover will be married by the next Spring. If today that might have seemed a bit equivocal (married to whom, a man or a woman?), we know that in 1983 it was a woman to whom Oliver was now committing himself. But as painful as that news has been, Elio has already come to perceive that their relationship was over. Those few halcyon days would never exist again, no matter if he will find another woman or man to love. The long take at the end of this quite lovely film, with the camera directly placed facing the quite brilliant Timothée Chalamet, embraces his beautiful face as tears well-up in his eyes and drop gradually over his chiseled cheeks, a fire crackling before him like an inferno of new possibilities or perhaps intense pains of suffering. We cannot know which. First loves merely introduce us to the rest of our sexual lives.

 

Los Angeles, December 10, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2017).