IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB () review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (C. Lemire) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review
Call Me by Your Name [2017] (directed by Luca Guadagnino, screenplay by James Ivory based on the novel [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] by André Aciman [wikip] [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] [IMDb]) is a challenging movie for someone like me to review. However, it ought to be far more challenging to most reviewers than it appears to be.
It's challenging to me because it's a sexually themed coming of age story and, well, I'm a Catholic priest. It ought to be challenging to more reviewers than one like me because it's _also_ a love story between a seventeen year old minor and an adult (!). Yet, not one of the three secular reviewers above seemed to have an issue with that.
It once fell to me to throw-out a band from the line-up of our Parish's music festival because one of its band-members turned out to be listed as a sex offender for having had the misfortune of picking-up a sixteen year old (girl) who was at a bar (with a fake id) where he had played some years back and had a gloriously _consensual_ (or "consensual") one-night stand with her. She thought her encounter with the "worldly" musician was AWEsome, 'cept, of course, her parents were not amused ... I also know a Catholic priest who was de-frocked, his life effectively destroyed, as a result of meeting someone at 1980s-era gay party, that someone, having ended up being a minor. In both cases, the first case involving a heterosexual encounter, in the other a homosexual one, the context was one in which one _could_ have thought that they had the right to assume that everyone present was "of age." Yet in both cases, it became tragically clear (too late for the adults involved ...) that this was not the case.
As a result, I simply find it extremely stupid to fantasize about "wouldn't it be nice..." when it involves a "love story" between an adult and a minor...
Yet the film proves how one could manipulate an audience (and even critics) into being enchanted by something that ought to be appalling. My favorite (and far safer) example of this was the film version of The English Patient [1996] which won all kinds of Oscars in its year. I laughed out-loud hearing an otherwise quite traditionalist friend of mine wax eloquent about how much he loved the movie, telling him: "Do you realize that that the two main characters in the film consummated their flagrantly _adulterous relationship_ in head banging fashion _on Christmas Eve_ with a garrison of British troops lined-up in formation in the plaza below them singing _Silent Night_" ;-). But there it is: Set a film in an exotic location be it in WW-II era Libya (The English Patient) or 1980s era Italy (the current film) and dress the characters in "clothes of the era" and ... you can have them do ANYTHING ...
Anyway, this is certainly a cinematically lovely film, but honestly a dangerous fantasy that could get all kinds of people in a world of trouble if acted upon. And if there's any doubt here, let me just end mentioning two words: Kevin Spacey ...
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