Call Me by Your Name

Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name opened in 2017 and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, adapted by James Ivory, then eighty-nine, from André Aciman's 2007 novel. Timothée Chalamet, then twenty-two, received his first Best Actor nomination; the role permanently established him as a leading-actor career. Sufjan Stevens contributed two original songs (Mystery of Love, Visions of Gideon) that became part of the film's continuing cultural reach.

Summer 1983, somewhere in northern Italy. Seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman (Chalamet) is spending the holidays with his American-Italian academic family in their seventeenth-century country villa. Oliver (Armie Hammer), a twenty-four-year-old American doctoral student, arrives to assist Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg, in the supporting performance widely considered the film's emotional anchor) with archaeological research for the summer. Across the next six weeks Elio and Oliver fall into the relationship the title's quotation hints at, and the film follows the love through to the autumn separation when Oliver returns to America.

The film operates in a register of long Italian summers, bicycle rides through Lombardy farm tracks, soft-light apricot kitchens, slow Bach piano transcriptions performed at the central upright. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's photography of Crema, Bergamo and the Lombardian Po valley produced one of the most distinctive landscape registers of recent European cinema. Stuhlbarg's late closing-act monologue about love is among the most-cited cinematic speeches of the late 2010s.