Program Notes

Synopsis

In the summer of 1983, in the north of Italy, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) a seventeen-year-old American spends his days in his family’s seventeenth-century villa lazily transcribing music and flirting with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). One day Oliver (Armie Hammer), a twenty-four-year-old graduate student working on his doctorate arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture. Soon, Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.

Director’s Statement

I like to think that Call Me by Your Name closes a trilogy of films on desire, together with I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. Whereas in the former films desire drives to possession, regret, contempt, and need for liberation, in Call Me by Your Name we wanted to explore an idyll of youth. Elio, Oliver, and Marzia are entangled in the beautiful confusion of what Truman Capote once described when he said that “love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.” Call Me by Your Name is also my homage to the fathers of my life: my own father, and my cinematic ones: Renoir, Rivette, Rohmer, Bertolucci...—Luca Guadagnino

(June 2019)