I saw Call Me By Your Name and I have feelings
The one bad line in Call Me By Your Name is when Armie Hammer says the title of the movie.
I saw it today, alone, in a theater full of people, a theater with not enough good seats. A big multiplex theater made for movies very different from this one. After several artsy, feelingsy trailers, they played one for a Jerry Bruckheimer war movie, and I was relived when everyone laughed. The trailer after that was terrible, too, and the man next to me said, somewhat to me, "Wrong crowd!"
I barely got a decent seat, but I was alone, and found a single. On my left was an older man, also by himself. Before the movie he snacked on a nice chocolate bar, which was a very good move. Throughout the movie he would lean forward in his seat, which I never see people do at the movies.
The movie wrecked me. I read the book, what, a decade ago? I left desperate to read it again, right now. (The wait for the ebook at the Brooklyn Library is estimated at five months.) I remember the book as languid and consuming. The movie had more pain. (Minor spoilers: The book felt like Armie Hammer holding the peach; the movie felt like Timothée Chalamet's reaction.) I thought that maybe seeing them—the bass-voiced man that is Armie Hammer, and tiny Timothée Chalamet with his reed of a torso all over the screen—reminded me how impossible it all is. But no, you always know this love is what it is. The movie just really hit Elio's pain, the suffering state of being seventeen.
Give Timothée Chalamet the Oscar.
The man on my left was seeing the movie alone, as I was, and I realized, eventually, that so was the man on my right. He was younger, maybe late 20s. At a few points in the movie, all three of us were crying, and I felt so much love for my seatmates that it hurt.
The movie, strangely, never felt like summer. Whenever anyone swam, I was worried they'd be cold.
The last shot of the movie is astonishing. My seatmates and I wept. After that, as the credits rolled in silence, everyone shuffled to leave. Then the lights came on, full-brightness. It was awful. I'd been crying. I went to the bathroom and cried in the stall some more.
I saw Lady Bird, also alone, last week. I almost never go to the movies, and now it's been three in one month (these two and Thor, which was also great, but not so thematically in step with the other two). But these two movies, god. Aside from the fact that we are blessed to have these two beautiful, artful, funny, heartbreaking, heart-mending movies at the same time, let alone at all; aside from the nosebleeds. The diptych of teen-hood they make is stunning: Lady Bird's beautiful, fraught love with her mother; Elio's agonizing love with Oliver. They're a pair and perfect opposites. I wonder if you have to have read the book of Call Me By Your Name to feel hope at the end.