Emily Warner questions whether Guadagnino’s 2017 film is a failure or success in its adaptation
Image Credit: Vox
Sensual, idyllic, tender; these are all words which apply to Guadagnino’s 2017 film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman. Set in Northern Italy, the mise en scène evokes a luxurious Italian estate, surrounded by the pastel skies, sepia-tinged streets and quaint landscapes which you might expect to find on the front of a vintage postcard. There is no denying the visual allure of the film which shimmers tantalisingly before its viewer, undoubtedly thriving on tourist culture yet still fooling us into exclaiming, ‘now I must visit Italy myself!’ We think ‘I too can ride vintage bicycles and swim in artificially sun-speckled seas, and fall in love with a beautiful Italian (because allItalians look like Timothee Chalamet of course, glistening with water, artistically perched beside a swimming pool, effortlessly strumming a guitar)’. I reiterate; this film is aesthetically faultless. However, read the first sentence of this article again slowly and you’ll notice something important yet overlooked by many of the film’s critics; it is a ‘film adaptation’ meaning a version of a book, a fact which Guadagnino fails to remember whilst liberally turning up the saturation dial and applying his suncream. For lovers of the film, this is your chance to stop reading, pop Sufjan Stevens into the CD player, close your eyes and pretend to be in Italy.
I probably just lost about 99 percent of the people reading this, but for those who have stayed, I argue that Call Me By Your Name completely fails as an adaptation of the novel, presenting a beautiful but ultimately empty landscape where only the shell of Aciman’s novel has been translated onto screen. Richard Brody’s article in the New Yorker called ‘The Empty, Sanitized Intimacy of “Call Me By Your Name”’ is a brutally honest stance which fittingly summarises my point. When I first read Call Me By Your Name, the most striking quality of the book was not its Elysian setting, but the nuanced way in which Aciman captured Elio’s thoughts – messy, conflicted, aching, real. The first-person narration gives the reader unfiltered access to the texture of intimacy. The style which borders on stream-of-consciousness portrays its myriad complexities and the language contains a beauty, unparalleled by the idle sunshine and long walks of the film.
Most of the vital passages in the novel are characterised by a ‘wanting to say’ or a ‘longing to interpret’ what is unsaid such as the moment when Elio confesses his feelings and thinks,‘ Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn’t want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him ‘You are the only person I’d like to say goodbye to when I die’’. This flurry of subordinate clauses comes with a cluster of ‘maybe’s and justifications and feelings through which we come to know Elio’s uncertain experience. The language is studded with fear, longing, conflict and emotions which cannot be articulated in a single glance as the film attempts to do. Coincidentally, this was the first scene Aciman witnessed being filmed and he wrote about how he “arrived at the most difficult and, perhaps, most important scene in my novel. Three minutes later, in a single tracking shot, the climactic moment of the film is done. ”Although Aciman goes on to praise the ability of Guadignino to distil his novel into elusive body language, there remains a sense of loss where “film cuts and trims with savage brevity” the rich passage of language, which is reduced to ‘three minutes’ of recording. Young love is arguably never done’ and never silent.
This is not to negate Guadignino’s ability to create a successful film, as evidenced by the trail of awards behind *Call Me By Your Name’*s parade across the globe. Admittedly, certain aspects do try to offer some sense of depth beyond the purely visual, such as the intimate touches between actors and interwoven musical numbers. The piano pieces denote an interior dialogue between Oliver and Elio, beyond what is expressible in words, and the tracks by Sufjan Stevens provide an alternative to dialogue, offering instead an emotionally charged backdrop. Regardless, none of these elements overcome the unavoidable limitations of film when it comes to representing interiority.
In her 1926 essay ‘The Cinema’, Virginia Woolf expressed these issues, arguing that “the images of a poet are not to be cast in bronze or traced by pencil. They are compact of a thousand suggestions of which the visual is only the most obvious or the uppermost.” This is not to suggest that film as a medium is inferior or invalid, but instead must be ‘left to its own devices’ to forge a new path and make use of different tools; like camera angles, music, visuals and setting. In the words of Woolf, “all this, which is accessible to words and to words alone, the cinema must avoid” and as such, film should never vaunt its ability to reproduce or enhance literature – even when Timothee Chalamet and his flowing locks are involved.