![call me by your name screenie call me by your name screenie](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1fe2112a18b48c44bec4c65dc4ef2d09/tumblr_p8uwpzkZGV1wqxbjdo9_500.png)
Beneath Call Me By Your Name‘s (admittedly exquisitely executed) generic shell, inscribed across a robust lexicon of metonyms, metaphors, and other textual artifacts, appears a confident, reflexive argument about cinema itself – its formal strategies of generating and channeling desire, and its historical role producing and disseminating fantasy.
![call me by your name screenie call me by your name screenie](https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lz5qmsMTUt1qarupao1_500.png)
These hermeneutical strands are all surely at work in Call Me By Your Name‘s narrative, but it occurs to me that raising any one of them as the film’s thematic fountainhead would be a misstep I posit, instead, that these critical tendencies are all held in unsteady parallel within the film, as the signifying material of a slightly more elusive argument that runs throughout. As it compares to two other coming-of-age drama films also released in 2017 – The Florida Project and Lady Bird, whose female protagonists all pursue their self-affirmation while combatting steep gender and class barriers – the film stands as a somewhat tone-deaf parade of bourgeois privilege, and an inadvertent commentary on the asymmetrical distribution of well-being across intersectional class lines. As it expands on the largely contrived, heteronormative conventions of the coming-of-age tale, the film has been read as a confident generic exploration, replacing any ostensible villain or antagonist with the insurmountable anxiety of a deadline, inexorably promising to call Oliver back to the United States and end the film’s central romance. According to its most upfront generic conventions, the film has been read as a coming-of-age drama that tenderly depicts the 17-year-old Elio’s first gay romance, as he bristles at, accepts, and finally falls in love with the 24-year-old Oliver, a visiting graduate student apprenticing under Elio’s professor father. In the riot of critical attention that Luca Guadagnino’s film Call Me By Your Name (2017, Luca Guadagnino) has accumulated since its release just over a year ago, it occurs to me that a crucial aspect has gone unacknowledged. But Seeing Through Whose Eyes: Call Me By Your Name and the Mechanisms of Love and Fantasyīy Miles Rufelds Volume 22, Issue 9 / September 2018 19 minutes (4720 words)