Best Movies: ‘Call Me By Your Name’ works better if you read the book AFTER the movie

It’s officially Hollywood honors season, which intends anxious moviegoers around the world can finally watch and compare the movies we’ve been hearing about for ages.

Perhaps the most elusive is Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Epithet .</ em> The film is currently only playing in New York and Los Angeles and awaiting a wider release, which means that you have time to read the book while you wait for it in another city or regions of the world.

But contrary to all instinct, you may want to wait before read. Call Me By Your Name is profoundly fulfilling on both page and screen, but Call Me By Your Epithet may just be the rare case where you should watch the movie first before reading the book.

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I read Call Me By Your Name in December, before understanding the movie that had just arrived in New York. The novel is unapologetically gripping within the first few pages as Andre Aciman wonderfully describes Elio’s attraction – his love, his preoccupation, his unfettered longing- to Oliver. Aciman’s words are choice with virtually chemical precision to create a vivid and exact portrait of how young love eats. The tale soars, in large proportion, because of Elio’s hyper honest narration, which dedicates the reader an intimate and unparalleled report of one person’s expedition through love.

Watching Call Me By Your Epithet on cinema lets the actor and audience construe the implications of every seem and gesture.

However, the movie of Call Me By Your Name does away with Elio’s narration, so onlookers don’t get those marvelous words. Instead, you get Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer acting the heck out of Elio and Oliver’s lusts and impulses, without any terms of narration to aid them in communicating their attraction.

Watching Call Me By Your Epithet on movie before reading the book lets the audience interpret the implications of every appear and gesture of Elio and Oliver, before learning of every detail of every single thread of thought that produced Elio to a single moment as Aciman depicts in the book.

Art is inherently subjective, much as we criticize it. Having the possibility of being freely interpret a relationship as complex as Elio and Oliver’s as an outside, third-person viewer, rather than through the novel’s first-person narration, merely adds to the depth of Call Me By Your Name .</ em>

Take, for example, one crucial interaction the two share early on. Oliver touchings Elio’s shoulder while a group of people are playing volleyball, and Elio jiggles away.

In the fiction, you’re treated to this passageway TAGEND

…I was so spellbound that I wrenched myself free from his touch, because a few moments longer I would have slackened like one of those tiny wooden playthings whose gimp-legged torso breakdowns as soon as the mainsprings are touched…It never occurred to me that what had totally panicked me when he touched me was exactly what startles virgins on being touched for the first time by the person they desire: he stirs nerves in their own homes they never knew existed and that render far, far more disturbing pleasures than they are used to on their own.

It’s a intentionally relatable excitement, placed early in the book to reveal you that Elio’s passion is rooted in desires we’ve all shared. Not until afterward do we have the inkling that this brief minute is something beyond a casual interaction at a volleyball game.

In the movie, though, you see that scene play out over a split second as Elio writhes away. No justification is offered, leaving the viewer to ask “Is he suffer? Is he being cautious? Is Elio even interested in Oliver? ” Where the novel embeds you in Elio’s psyche, the screen version gives you neither Elio’s desire nor Oliver’s doubt in the moment. The scene is loaded with potential precisely because of its ambiguity — we could be any of those casual volleyball game bystanders, unaware that something far more tender is blossoming in their midst.

And those instants of viewer interpreting are echoed time and again in all areas of the movie. For instance, after Elio and Oliver’s first night together, Aciman expends pages and pages on Elio’s complicated thinks about what just happened. As Aciman outlines in the fiction, Elio and Oliver’s coupling is not the be-all-end-all bliss Elio supposed, but Elio feels that if it had remained in his imagination he would have gone mad wanting to live the experience.

Something bordering on nausea, something like repentance- was that it, then?- began to grip me and seemed to define itself ever more clearly the more I became aware of incipient daylight through our windows…I had known it would suffer. What I hadn’t expected was that the suffer would find itself coiled and twisted into sudden pangs of guilt.

Elio seems disgusted with himself, yet he cannot regret their own decisions he never questioned. He feels an unbridgeable distance growing between him and everyone and everything tied to his life before the nighttime with Oliver.

The beauty of the movie is that instead of analyzing[ the scene] for us, we as the onlooker get to watch Elio experience it.

In the cinema, all of those conflicting thoughts is necessary imparted through Chalamet-as-Elio’s face, where it can be hard, as a an outside viewer watching an actor, to piece apart all those warring emotions merely by watching.

But once again, that ambiguity may be the film’s strength. It seems impossible that this building, tumultuous romance would include the sort of temporary revulsion Aciman describes in the fiction. It is the contradiction of not wanting someone once you find out they crave you, and the beauty of the movie is that instead of investigating it for us, we as the spectator get to watch Elio experience it.

That’s not to say that Elio has cast away Oliver. The moment Oliver leaves for the working day, Elio longs for his corporation as both pal and buff. In the book, readers are offered TAGEND

He was my secret conduit to myself- like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that continues a soldier’s bone together, the other man’s heart that attains us more us than we were before the transplant.
The very thought of this abruptly made me want to drop everything I would do today and run to him.

In the movie, viewers see this TAGEND

We ascertain what Oliver recognizes, which is a perplexed child grappling with sexuality and longing.

And perhaps that discloses the film’s greatest strength. Call Me By Your Epithet ‘s not-so-secret weapon is Chalamet, whose performance communicates everything in Elio’s head and more if “youre watching” closely enough.

Call Me By Your Name ‘s not-so-secret weapon is Chalamet, whose performance transmits everything in Elio’s head and more

Take for instance, the film’s emotional closing, one long shot of Chalamet’s face presented during the credits in which we watch Elio process his relationship. Few other actors could carry such a powerful aiming. Once again we are maddeningly distanced from Elio’s inner thoughts and can only wonder how he feels after everything that’s happened. You’ll relive every moment the two of them had together and hope it’ll harvest answers. You’ll ache for him, a mere son, as you watch the magnitude of the summer rinse over him.

As it happens, the book ends going beyond that, with Elio recounting Oliver’s whereabouts and their missed connects well into adulthood. If the movie violated you, the book may offer some consolation in filling in what follows. Then again, it is likely to infringe you all over again.

This isn’t as simple as a book or movie being better than its equivalent. Call Me By Your Name can and should be experienced in both forms: each text merely enriches the other and bolsters this already surging story of adoration, lust, and yearning.

The novel is phenomenally written, but the cinema offers a rare opportunity to interpret two people’s incredible travel of falling in love. It’s an opportunity that should be experienced before reading exactly what the main character feelings in the novel. Instead of poring over the text beforehand, we can savor the opportunity to witness Elio and Oliver’s adoration without expectancy, subject to our honest reactions and the actors’ raw performance. And afterward- as the Oscar buzz constructs- we can read the book and wonder over what inspired such a magnificent movie.

We do not deserve either, to be clear. But we can damn well try to earn them.