BEATING HEARTS Compassion and Self-discovery in Call Me by Your Name
‘When you least expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot,’ Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) tells his heartbroken seventeen-year-old son in the penultimate scene of Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017). Elio (Timothée Chalamet) has just returned from a few days away in Bergamo with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American graduate student who has spent six weeks with his family as his father’s intern, and with whom he has fallen unexpectedly and deeply in love. Professor Perlman’s reflection is wise and warm – a father’s wish to normalise, not remove, the pain his son is feeling at this vulnerable time.
The conversation that unfolds between them confirms Call Me by Your Name’s deep fabric of compassion: a father who absolutely accepts his son’s sexual desire for a man, and who encourages Elio to accept this part of himself by embracing, rather than running from, his pain. As he explains, ‘To make yourself feel nothing, so as not to feel anything – what a waste.’ In treating Elio’s experience with such sensitivity, Professor Perlman shows his son how to be compassionate and gentle with himself, too.
Guadagnino’s film, based on the 2007 novel by André Aciman and working from a screenplay by James Ivory, is set in 1983, ‘somewhere in northern Italy’. The narrative develops almost exclusively from Elio’s point of view. We are with him from the opening scene, when Oliver arrives at the villa and Elio catches his first glimpse of him from the window above, and we rarely leave his side. Elio is both an average and quite extraordinary young man. He is a voracious reader and a prodigious pianist. But, like many teens, he is also awkward, cocky and insecure.
His communication skills are under development. When Elio finally tells Oliver how he feels about him on the morning when they circle the Battle of
