movie review: Call me by your name (2017)

Unequivocal sensory pleasure. Many will bask in Guadagnino's sybaritic paintings of brief and intense sexual/emotional satisfaction - practically entirely made up of peeks and scans, caresses and grazes - and gentle familial dynamics, and while it's an endless lake to swim in, its primary thrill for me was the depiction of meticulous surface: what bubbles up and blends into nature's constitution.

Ramifications and boundless joys of Elio and Olliver's journey rest on the same sun-soaked playing field, encasing summer stints as calculated uprisings of informed experience, rushes of lust, and a lingering sense of finality. Guadagnino is aware that the end of this story reveals its hand as soon as it begins - a certainty of loss, a gushing waterfall soon ceased by the hand of a god - so the only real course of action is an evocation of similar finite materials. Fruit, exercise, water, touch, sex, cum, embrace: Call Me by Your Name is a world of desire stretched across flatland, mountains, cobbled roads, and families of peach trees. The dog-day air surges from the screen, engulfing and daring the audience to float along the clouds. But soon, it's over. You know it. Guadagnino knows it. Elio and Oliver knew it. They are now spirits of a moment and setting, of touches and climaxes and tears, and it will forever echo, onward in the spark of their lives.

If you leave during the end credits: congratulations, you played yourself.

90/100