Alright, so I had a bit of a hiccough over the last couple of weeks. I came down with a cold, thanks in part to being around a bunch of children and teachers. Despite my directive, someone passed their disease to me. Then, when things were looking better, my computer decided to die. I have that sorted (maybe) with a new hard disk drive but who really knows with computers. I already had my mouse give up on the sweet struggle of life. Call me unlucky, but anything can go in this crazy world of ours.

So, yeah, I’ve missed my posting. Apologies. Good news is that I know what I’m doing for the next month or so. It may or may not be tied to an upcoming announcement. Is vague! Be excited! Tentatively!

But that leaves me with a post to make today. As I’ve fully brought you up to date with the crazy twists and turns of my life, I suppose the last thing available to me to describe is a movie I saw awhile ago. It was a little independent flick called Call Me By Your Name. I think it may have been nominated for an Oscar. I know around Oscar season, my family and friends get a little more motivated to see some flicks thus proving the effectiveness of the over marketed and highly unimportant awards ceremony. However, I’m not going to complain too vociferously over entertainment and spending time with people that I like.

Instead, I’ll give you my review of Call Me by Your Name.

It’s boring.

Boom, review done!

No but really I found the movie long and tedious. I had a hard time feeling sympathetic to the main character. There wasn’t really anything of interest or note to capture my attention. The plot is a coming of age and a coming out story of some young man in the early eighties. You’d think given those two pretty well covered themes that the movie would have something to revolve its two and some odd hour plot. But not really. It’s not like Elio has any real conflict to overcome. His parents are atypically accepting for that time period. His family is pretty well off, living in some northern Italian villa where the greatest challenges Elio faces is deciding whether he wants to swim in the local river or the family’s private pool. His greatest turmoil is that his room is given over to a summer student and he has to stay in the slightly smaller guest room right next door.

Course, this summer, it just so happens that the oh-so-dreamy Armie Hammer moves into his room and turns poor Elio’s life upside down! Or not. Maybe. It’s really hard to say. Elio still just putters around the manor though now he’s just complaining about the uncouth American under his roof in three different languages to his family and friends. Nor does Armie Hammer really introduce much in the ways of inconvenience towards Elio since he’s actually quite educated and rather polite – apparently for an American. So the plot putters around the unspoken and, generally undeserved, conflict within Elio has he tries to come to terms that he has a crush on Armie Hammer while he masturbates with a peach and pops his girlfriend’s cherry. He also eats a bunch of apples because this movie is seemingly filled with fruit.

And just when the movie starts to float the potential that maybe, possibly, theoretically his family might not approve, an older gay couple come to visit and its revealed they’re long time friends of Elio’s parents. When Elio makes some disparaging comment about them afterward, his father is quick to reprimand him for being discriminatory. So that balloon pops in the shortest conflict resolution I’ve seen in a film.

Call Me by Your Name is directed by Luca Guadagnino and is produced by Frenesy Film Company and distributed by Sony Pictures Classic. I do not own it or associated media.

And it’s not like there was a lot to distract from the aimless narrative. The Italian countryside is pretty much just some small village and remote farms. The soundtrack is artsy, I suppose. I think there’s something to be made by the piano pieces used sporadically throughout. I’m not sure. I’m neither a theatre or music major. No, I spent the majority of the film trying to figure out how old Armie Hammer is supposed to be. Given the context of the film, I think he’s meant to be in his early twenties. At most he’s a master’s student and Elio’s father’s university. Which would put him around twenty-four years old? I got the impression that the movie was billed as some taboo generational gap relationship but I can’t really say that an eighteen and twenty-four year old are really of vastly different generations. And given that absolutely no one comments on the age gap in the movie, this is neither a source of concern or thematic importance. It’s mostly just Armie Hammer playing a younger character and seeming much older because Armie Hammer has always looked like a middle aged man.

So, yeah, it was boring.

There is a humorous observation I made, however. Granted, I’m hardly an expert in gay cinema, but I’ve seen a couple of movies and there’s this really bizarre element in them. For some reason, gay cinema objectifies women far more than mainstream cinema.

This isn’t to imply that they’re sexually objectified though there’s certainly quite a bit of boob in Call Me by Your Name. No, I mean that these movies quite frequently strip agency and personality from their female characters even more than normal. For example, Elio’s girlfriend and her friend exist solely in the movie to act as the socially pressured romantic interest and contribute nothing else. The girlfriend is there only for Elio to agonize over whether he should keep having sex with her despite wanting sex with Armie Hammer. The moment he realizes, no obviously everyone would go for the giraffe, the girlfriend pretty much falls right off the screen never to been seen again (save for a very brief moment wherein she forgives Elio in order to absolve him of any guilt from the plot). Elio’s mother, likewise, serves as the mouthpiece of parental disapproval for youths struggling with their identities even though she too has a scene where she expresses her undying affection for her child regardless of what he might do or who he might be. And just like that, she too disappears from the plot.

Like, I get that the core struggle of gay media is the still controversial sexual relationship between men but this doesn’t mean that gay men don’t have any relationships with women. That female characters get reduced strictly to their sexual role in the gay character’s struggle for self acceptance is strange to me. Maybe this is just a stereotype, but in my experience most gay guys I knew from school associated and connected far more with the girls in their social circles than the guys. That there’s a seeming dearth of representation for these close and important bonds in gay youths strikes me as peculiar. It’s a trend that is both perpetuating negative portrayals of women in cinema while simultaneously missing an important real world element. Maybe it’s because gay cinema focuses solely on eliciting feelings of loneliness and abandonment that this occurs since stigmatization from male peers is pretty easily explained and fairly accurate for reality. Or maybe this is an example of patriarchal influences wherein even when dealing with stories of discriminated classes, there’s a sense that to achieve some measure of respect you still need to disassociated yourself from other discriminated classes. I don’t know, I’m not brushed up on fourth wave feminism.

At any rate, when the girlfriend was telling Elio that she had a secret I was super hoping she was going to come out as a lesbian because, despite the astronomical odds, I would have found that far more engaging than Elio continuing to be grumpy while batting puppy dog eyes at Armie Hammer for another thirty minutes. Plus it would really spin his relationship with his girlfriend on its head, demonstrating quite clearly that he really didn’t care nor know anything about this girl who was just dragged across the village green so he could prove his manliness by conquering her. It would have also kicked Elio into confronting his own feelings a good twenty minutes ahead too which would have been a merciful reprieve.

Now, after saying all that, I do want to end on a positive note. Both for female representation and gay cinema in general. With the handful of gay films I’ve seen, I’d count two amongst them as being really good. There’s Weekend by Andrew Haigh but more important to the discussion is C.R.A.Z.Y. by Jean-Marc Vallee. I think both actually do a far better job of tackling homophobia within society and gay men’s experience of discovering themselves while navigating discrimination from the greater public. And C.R.A.Z.Y. is very similar to Call Me by Your Name as it specifically deals with a young man accepting his sexuality and how it impacts his relationship with his father. And yet, despite being a film strictly about male relationships (both sexual and non-sexual), C.R.A.Z.Y. still presents its women characters in a far more rounded light. While Zac’s mother is devoted to her son much in the same way as Elio’s, there’s a greater depth of characterization and portrayal to her despite still occupying a minor role in the overall narrative.

Course there’s another element in C.R.A.Z.Y. and Weekend that’s missing in Call Me by Your Name. Both films try and tackle more than the mere sexual experience of the character and draws deeper on the personal relationships of the characters with the families and society. It seeks to unveil some fundamental aspect of humanity, regardless of the sexuality of the characters and the conflict that causes, and brushes against a universalism for the human condition. Call Me by Your Name, on the other hand, comes off as some flippant summer crush that indulges the idle fantasy of “what if” towards an unlikely scenario which really only teaches us that summer flings are fleeting and ephemeral. But even this carpe diem read is more generous as Call Me by Your Name doesn’t truly push this momentary seizure as desirable when we’re revealed that Armie Hammer has returned home to marry his off-again, on-again girlfriend while Elio’s father looms over him warning that the future fast approaches when no one will want him anymore.

Maybe instead of requesting that Armie Hammer forget his name, Elio should have requested that he just keep in contact more often. Carly Rae Jepsen probably had the better idea all along.