Gently resting his acoustic guitar atop a bench, Elio (Timothée Chalamet) gives Oliver (Armie Hammer) a direction: “Follow me.” And so, Oliver does, leaving the sun-soaked garden and crossing the back door of the Italian manor where he is spending summer as a pupil to Elio’s father, a renowned professor of archaeology.
Elio, a talented musician, takes a seat in front of a piano, playing a new variation on Bach’s ‘Allegro’. Oliver protests: “Play that again. The thing you played outside,” to which Elio charmingly retorts, “Oh, you want me to play that thing I played outside?” This brief exchange, at once playful and intense, clarifies not only the undercurrent of desire at the centre of Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 hit Call Me by Your Name but also how desire itself manifests within the Italian director’s oeuvre.
Bothered by having his films constantly described as portrayals of “rich people lounging by the pool,” Guadagnino once off-handedly labelled his back-to-back features of , and as his “Desire Trilogy”. This throwaway observation is now gospel to those hungry for tells the story of a love triangle between three impossibly hot tennis players and first met the world through a trailer cut to the beat of Rihanna’s kinky sex anthem “S&M,” a song that offers just as fitting a descriptor to Guadagnino’s work: “The affliction of the feeling leaves me wanting more.”
