Luca Guadagnino’s film is a study in heat — literal and otherwise. It is set in a villa in northern Italy in the summer of 1983, and the summer is not incidental. Everything in the film — the light, the slowness, the way time stretches and then suddenly collapses — is an argument that desire is inseparable from its conditions. Remove the peach orchard, the afternoon swims, the long lunches that drift into dusk, and the film does not exist. This is a film about a specific summer, which is the only kind of summer that matters.
Timothée Chalamet plays Elio, seventeen, the precocious son of an academic, with the kind of performance that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable about how good it is. He is all nerve endings — reading, playing piano, writing in his journal, orbiting the older American graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) who arrives to assist his father. The film traces what develops between them over six weeks with a patience that is itself erotic: nothing is rushed, and every delay accumulates.
The film’s final scene — Chalamet alone by a fireplace as the credits roll, his face cycling through something like every emotion in sequence — is among the best pieces of acting in recent cinema. It asks nothing of the viewer except attention, and attention is exactly what it deserves.
Michael Stuhlbarg’s speech near the end, as Elio’s father, is the kind of scene that reveals itself differently every time you watch it. See the film once for the summer. See it again for that scene.
VERDICT — A film about first love made with the generosity and clarity that the subject demands. Essential.
POUR — A cold glass of something Italian. A Pinot Grigio, a Soave, something that tastes like somewhere warm.
MOOD — Open. A little nostalgic. Ready to remember what it felt like before everything became complicated.
Plan this evening with a Date Night guide: The Slow Dinner at Home.
The kind of film that rewards a second viewing. Find it on Blu-ray.
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