Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Call me by your name’ collects yet another recognition, or better, four of them, four nominations for the 2018 Academy Awards. The four categories for which the movie has been nominated are: Best Picture, Lead Actor for Timothée Chalamet, Adapted Screenplay for James Ivory, and Original Song for ‘Mystery of Love’ by Sufjan Stevens.
In the nomination-worthy screenplay, written by James Ivory adapting the eponymous novel by André Aciman, the whole narrative tension is held by Elio, played by Timothée Chalamet, and Oliver, played by Armie Hammer. It is a story of development that brings together sex, love and self-discovery. Oliver, a 24-year-old university student, arrives in the summer of 1983 in Italy to collaborate with the father of Elio, a seventeen-year-old musician. During the unfolding of the emotionally complex story, the two will end up falling in love and spending moments of pure love. Guadagnino had the two leading actors in mind well ahead of time, he artistically fell in love with Hammer in ‘The Social Network’, while he believed Chamelet, who he had known since he was a boy, to possess the right sensitivity to interpret Elio. Chamelet himself read the novel when he was only 17, and was definitely impressed by it.
Guadagnino, with ‘Call me by your name’ closed his “trilogy of desire”, which also include ‘I Am Love’ and ‘A Bigger Splash’, released respectively in 2009 and 2015. Among his previous works there is also ‘Melissa P.’, another adolescent self-discovery movie, but here the protagonist is a girl that grows up and has her first sexual experiences. Guadagnino announced for 2018 the release of his remake of Dario Argento’s masterpiece ‘suspiria’.
Ilona Catani Scarlett