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The art house film “Call Me By Your Name” has become something of a mainstream hit, thanks to the performances of Timothèe Chalamet and Armie Hammer, lush direction by Luca Guadagnino, and several Oscar nominations—including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. The love story, based on an Andrè Aciman novel, takes place during a dream-like Italian summer as a teenage musical prodigy falls for his father’s graduate student.
While the film adheres closely to the book in some ways, screenwriter James Ivory streamlined and simplified the story. And thus, movie fans who pick up the book might find a few elements of the modernist, stream-of-consciousness novel surprising or confusing.
Here’s a rundown of some of the biggest changes. Obviously, let this be a spoiler alert for both.
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1. The book does not end with Elio learning of Oliver’s engagement.
The movie ends with a heartbreaking phone call and Elio embracing his pain. In the book, Oliver comes in person to break the news of his engagement. Elio tries to rekindle their affair, and Oliver gently rejects him. The book then moves forward in time when Elio, now in his early thirties, drops by Oliver’s office at a New England university.
Those expecting a romantic reunion will be disappointed, as is Elio, who finds in Oliver a content and devoted family man. And yet, in an intense conversation over drinks it’s clear both men have longed for one another since parting. A few years later, after Elio’s father has passed, Oliver visits the villa and the men again reminisce. More longing. Aciman nails the longing.
Guadagnino has already announced his intention to make a sequel. But it’s likely that the book will only be a loose starting point, since not much happens beyond deep longing in those final scenes. And a key emotional climax centers around a character who doesn’t even appear in the film.
2. Book Oliver has a platonic love affair with the little girl next door. Emphasis on Plato.
Living in the next villa over is Vimini, a beautiful little girl with leukemia who happens to share Oliver and Elio’s interests in classical philosophy, music, and volleyball. She, not Elio’s mother, is the one who tells Elio that she thinks Oliver likes him. Rather than jealous of the attention Oliver pays her, Elio finds the purity of their friendship captivating.
While Vimini could be there just to show otherwise cocky Oliver’s sensitive side, nothing is ever that simple in a modernist novel. She and Elio share the same birthday, and she is precisely seven years younger than him, while Oliver is seven years older than Elio. She could be a manifestation of the feminine side of young boys that is often jettisoned when they reach full adulthood. She may also represent Elio’s childhood while Oliver represents his future. Or, if you know your Ovid, the chatterbox little girl also might be Echo to Elio’s Narcissus.
3. Elio could be Narcissus.
The novel has been criticized by some within the LGBT lit community for being more autoerotic (see the title) than homoerotic. Over and over, Oliver and Elio are portrayed as mirror images of each other. The gazes they share between their bedrooms feel almost like they are looking at their past and future selves. Elio fetishizes Oliver’s clothes, becomes aroused at the thought that they look alike naked, and even refers to them as the same person at times. He imagines what it would be like to live inside Oliver’s body and to fuse with his molecules. He even wants to be present while Oliver uses the toilet.
Since the book is jam-packed with classical references, one could loosely interpret Elio as a modern-day Narcissus. In Ovid, beautiful Narcissus breaks both male and female hearts until he falls in love with his own reflection, mistaking the nymph Echo’s voice for his reflection’s voice.
In the final passages of the book, Oliver reveals he has thought of both Elio and the long dead Vimini all these years, and Elio wishes to be called Oliver by Oliver again.
4. The strange flirtation with a hotel clerk.
Ivory has said that the young men’s trip to Rome, which in the film is replaced by a trip to Bergamo, would have been too expensive to shoot. While in the book’s Rome, Elio and Oliver joyously hobnob with the Italian intelligentsia and stay in a fancy hotel courtesy of Elio’s father. There, Elio hears the story of a poet’s flirtation with a hotel clerk who he first believes is a man and then reveals herself to be a woman.
While the film leans toward a gay/bi reading of the characters’ sexuality, the book is more complicated. Like any novel with an unreliable narrator, the book has inspired multiple interpretations. I’ll trust my friend—queer writer and poet Earl Carrender (@Nu_Flash_Prose)—who supports reading the novel as a “modern revision of the classical model,” with Aciman exploring Greco-Roman ideas of sexuality that don’t quite mesh with our contemporary definitions.
That certainly helps understand the poet’s heavily symbolic response to the clerk, who asks if he prefers her as a man or woman. He responds, “I didn’t know what answer to give. I wanted to say, I want you as intermezzo. So I said, I want you as both, or as in between.”
It all connects back to a concept the poet calls San Clemente Syndrome, a metaphor for how time, space, gender and ideas exist together. This scene can also be connected to the book’s embrace of Elio’s teenage androgyny, as represented in the film by his father’s agelessly ambiguous statues.
5. Oliver Has Good Reason to Emotionally Withdraw the Morning After.
In the film, the morning after their first sexual encounter, Oliver goes to the postoffice alone and vulnerable Elio follows him and is embarrassed when Oliver seems amused to see him. The same scene happens in the book but with more complications. The morning after having the You’ll kill me if you stop sex, Elio becomes first spooked then aloof. Oliver, meanwhile, behaves like a loving and concerned boyfriend, and he seems hurt by Elio’s standoffishness. Oliver doesn’t take this lying down and thus engages in the daylight oral teasing, which does occur in the film. His actions have the intended effect. Elio follows Oliver to the postoffice—the desire for distance forgotten.
6. The Ocean, philosophy and other stuff…
One major location from the book is missing from the film, also for budgetary reasons. In the book, the family’s villa sits right on the ocean, with a beach and rocks a short staircase away. Here is where Elio often makes love to Mariza, where he discovers Oliver has not been gallivanting about with the village girls but rather sitting alone thinking of Elio, where Elio fears Oliver has drowned, and where Oliver and Vimini’s friendship plays out.
In classical mythology, the ocean means change and mutability, sexuality and danger and….other stuff.
On top of that, the book contains more references Heraclitus, Dante, Plato, Bach, Hayden and a myriad of other things that Aciman invites the reader to analyze, discuss and project meaning upon. My friend with a degree in classical music recently treated me to an explanation of the various uses of music in both the film and the book and what they might mean. Another friend, with a PhD in mythology, had an awful lot more to say about Ovid and Plato than could possibly be covered in this article.
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Whatever one’s interpretation, the book and the film have provoked intense reactions, inspired conversations about gender, sexuality, and ripe peaches. That should tide fans over until the film’s sequel comes along.
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Photo Credit: Sony Pictures Classics