★★★★★
DIRECTOR Luca Guadagnino has impressed mightily thus far with vibrant films like I Am Love and most recently the danger-tinged romantic drama A Bigger Splash. For this sumptuous offering, he has concocted an irresistible mix of besotted romance and coming-of-age complexity.
We’re laid luxuriously “somewhere in northern Italy” in 1983 at the rural home of American professor Mr Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), who welcomes 20-something graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) to stay for the summer – just one in a long line of former students who have done so.
But this one is different, as Mr Perlman’s 17-year-old son Elio (Timothée Chalamet) finds out. He has a sort-of girlfriend in Marzia (Esther Garrel) but is still feeling his way around his developing sexuality. As the days go by, Elio becomes beguiled by the visiting Oliver and, before long, the two begin to act upon a connection that for the first while goes agonisingly unapproached.
Guadagnino builds on the themes of his previous work for this exquisite portrait of perceived forbidden love that we see bloom before our eyes in achingly heartfelt and intensely intimate fashion, hitting just the right tone between frankness and tastefulness that’s masterfully enrapturing.
Working from a script by the legendary, now 89-year-old James Ivory and adapted from the 2007 novel by André Aciman, he sweeps us into a hazily enthralling world captured by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s gorgeous cinematography, using lingering shots and close-ups that leave a haunting impression. And despite its inherent conflict with the more classical locale, a whirlwind 1980s pop music-infused soundtrack just makes the drama leap off the screen all the more.
Chalamet is a revelation as Elio, conflicted between his generally aloof attitude to life and the tentativeness that comes with the tender yet rapturous romance that’s very much filtered through his eyes. Hammer is absolutely compelling in a way that skilfully conveys Oliver’s enigmatic and exotic identity that, coupled with Elio’s hormonally complicated sexual identity, causes the fixation to intensify.
There’s a real sense of warmth towards these well-drawn characters, the feeling that they are living and breathing people as opposed to simplistic caricatures. Aside from the centralised duo, Stuhlbarg is particularly wonderful as the easygoing father of the household who, in the film’s later stages, leads one of the most genuinely profound and affecting scenes in recent cinematic memory.
Told with passion, sun-kissed panache and a keen eye for effective up-close-and-personal storytelling, Guadagnino’s film is an alluring, heartfelt ode to infatuated love and genuine human connection. It’s one of the year’s absolute best films.
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