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Abstract
Critics of Call Me by Your Name/Chiamami col tuo nome (Luca Guadagnino, 2017) have accused the film of being inauthentic. In venues in Italy and internationally, we find the complaint that the film is not really Italian, does not include authentic gay sex, or that it is not authentically gay at all. For some, its bourgeois class fantasy renders it inauthentic in the sense of not being gritty enough, not a true representation of Italy’s class and ethnic diversity. For others, the way Elio’s family are open to his sexuality is implausibly liberal. Regardless of what aspect of the film is being attacked, this problem of authenticity seems to center the negative press. This essay uses these questions as a way to interrogate the film’s relationship to Italian-ness and its representation of homosexuality. Although cries of inauthenticity often serve simply to bolster a conservative approach to cinematic value, setting up a “real” and “true” identity against which a film might fail to measure up, we think this debate over Chiamami exposes a fraught intersection of Italian cinema and gay histories.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Libi Ben-Yoar, David W. Pansing, Ivan Girina, Lewis McClenaghan, Silvia Magistrali, Dominic Holdaway, Stephen Gundle, and the audience at the University of Bologna’s “Made in Italy” conference for their immensely helpful contributions to this essay.
Notes
1 A note about language: we have opted primarily to use “Italianicity” over “Italian-ness,” as the former evokes the Italian word italianicità, bringing with it a history of semiotically inflected cultural studies and discussions of what is now referred to as “Brand Italy.” We understand Italianicity to be about discursive constructions of Italy, circulating both within and outside the nation. For a canonical example of this usage, see Roland Barthes’ analysis of an advertisement of Panzani foods in his essay “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32–51, especially 33–37.
2 “Call Me by Your Name press conference with Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet, Luca Guadagnino,” October 9, 2017, The Upcoming channel, accessed August 16, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Daw1fLvvdlI.
When asked whether Italian audiences will see the film differently from American audiences, Guadagnino responds, “I have a very spiky relationship with the Italian industry and audience. Probably they will think this is a sort of dream of an American, but I am Italian.”
“The Guardian at Tiff 2017: cast and crew of Call Me by Your Name”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NQrUgehtr0GuardianNews
Published on 11 September 2017. Accessed 8 March 2019.
3 “Guadagnino: ‘Chiamami col tuo nome è un film profondamente italiano,’” La Stampa, January 24, 2018, accessed August 18, 2018, http://www.lastampa.it/2018/01/24/multimedia/spettacoli/guadagnino-chiamami-col-tuo-nome-un-film-profondamente-italiano-AolKgTQXtfSRfg8MaMfl7L/pagina.html.
4 Guadagnino describes how nearly 15 years before the film’s release producers Peter Spears and Howard Rosenman, who were in the process of adapting the novel, approached him to help to find a village that would fit the story. “NYFF Live: Making ‘Call Me by Your Name' | NYFF55” Film Society of Lincoln Center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCJquKusENs&feature=youtu.be, Published on 7 October 2017. Accessed 12 March 2019.
5 “Luca Guadagnino on His Tender New Film ‘Call Me By Your Name’”, Olivia Dennis, Lindsay Magazine, http://lindsaymagazine.co/luca-guadagnino-call-me-by-your-name/, 10 July 2017, Accessed 12 March 2019.
6 Anthony Lane, “‘Call Me by Your Name’: An Erotic Triumph,” The New Yorker, December 4, 2017, Accessed March 12, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/call-me-by-your-name-an-erotic-triumph.
7 In one interview, Guadagnino talks about the idea of cosmopolitanism alongside his family’s multi-ethnic background and his mother’s mixed heritage, “It’s almost normal [because of my upbringing, for a family] to switch from one language to another.”
“The Guardian at Tiff 2017: cast and crew of Call Me by Your Name”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NQrUgehtr0. Guardian News channel.
Published on 11 September 2017, Accessed 13 March 2019.
8 Richard Brody, “The Empty, Sanitized Intimacy of ‘Call Me by Your Name’” The New Yorker, November 28, 2017, Accessed March 12, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-empty-sanitized-intimacy-of-call-me-by-your-name. At the same time, Emiliano Morreale’s review for La Repubblica sees the film’s constant referencing of works of high culture as so excessive as to be ironic, stating, “Guadagnino ha anche un certo distacco ironico, e gioca con un profluvio di riferimenti sul filo della parodia.” Emiliano Morreale, “L’educazione sentimentale secondo Guadagnino,” La Repubblica, 25 January 2018: 37.
9 One Italian review refers to the Perlmans as a “famiglia ebrea italoamericana.” Nicola Falcinella, “Un’estate liquida in una ricca villa padana,” L’Eco di Bergamo, 26 January 2018: 66. Il Messaggero identifies Chalamet as simultaneously raised in “una cosmopolita famiglia d’art” and “il nostro” Antione Doinel, referring to the iconic star of François Truffaut’s coming-of-age film The 400 Blows (1959). Gloria Satta, “Guadagnino ‘Vince la compassione,’” 25 January 2018: 23.
10 Brody, “Empty, Sanitized Intimacy.”
11 Brody, “Empty, Sanitized Intimacy.”
12 Rob LeDonne, “Explore the Italian Film Locations of ‘Call Me by Your Name,’” Marriott Traveler, Apple News, accessed August 18, 2018, https://apple.news/AFe4raKF2RsyuaQrCEDGOkA. This same feature appeared on Apple News on March 30, 2018 under the title “See Northern Italy Through the Enchanting Lens of ‘Call Me by Your Name.’”
13 It should be noted that Chiamami as text and paratext enabled the character of Mafalda to gain a great prominence in the discourse about the film, despite her limited screen time. Her point of view shot is one of the most noticed examples of camera work in the film. At the same moment that Guadagnino was proclaiming his identification with her over either Elio or Oliver, GIFs, memes and other online modes of fan worship around her as a figure flourished on social media. “Call Me By Your Name – Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet Q&A”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDeG0zuvQQo&t=71s, Landmark Theatres
Published on Mar 13, 2018. Accessed 13 March 2019.
14 Mariarosa Mancuso, “Guadagnino non è un fuoriclasse ma è un professionista,” Il Folgio, XXIII: 21 (25 January 2018): 1. This review comes from a right-wing newspaper whose founder, Giuliano Ferrara, had deep ties with Craxi and the Catholic lobby in this period. Hence, it should be noted that although it is representative of a mainstream critical reaction to Chiammi’s aesthetic, this source comes to us refracted by the echoes of a mainstay of 80s Italy political culture.
15 Surveying the critical reception of Guadagnino’s films in the United States, Damiano Garofalo and Dom Holdaway identify the two opposing trends: a fetishization of their Italianicity and a celebration of their universalism. Included in the allusions to things Italian, they catalog references to exoticism, food, design, art, and the traditions of auteur cinema. Interestingly, Garofalo and Holdaway argue that there has been a historical shift from an emphasis on Italianicity in the earlier films to increased emphasis on the universal that culminates in Chiamami. “Tra italianità e universalità: La ricezione critica statunitense di Luca Guadagnino,” conference presentation, American Association for Italian Studies Annual Conference, Sant’Anna Institute, Sorrento, June 2018.
16 Paolo Mereghetti, “Il fascino della scoperta del sesso nel racconto di una dolce estate,” Corriere della Sera, 22 January 2018: 31.
17 The number of foreign tourists visiting Italy almost doubled from 22 million in 1980 to 41 million in 2000. See Bill Bramwell, ed. Mass Tourism, Diversification and Sustainability in Southern Europe’s Coastal Regions (Cleveden: Channel View Publications, 2004), 7; and the European Environment Agency’s Fact Sheet 2001, https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/tourism-intensity/tourism-arrivals, accessed 8 December 2018.
18 Spencer Kornhaber, “The Shadow Over Call Me by Your Name,” The Atlantic, January 3, 2018, accessed 25 May, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-shadow-over-call-me-by-your-name/549269/.
19 D. A. Miller, “Elio’s Education,” Los Angeles Review of Books, accessed 16 August, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elios-education/.
20 Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
21 Miller has similar concerns about Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) and suggests both films represent prominent examples of an “exasperating tradition” of recent films that mainstream queer desire “by averting our eyes from the distinctive gay male sex act”.
22 “Les cadres n’ouvrent jamais le champ au complet. Le jardin, le salon, la chambre paraissent à l’instar des souvenirs bouleversants, très précis et incomplets, incroyablement vivants.” Dominique Widemann, “Cinéma. Un été qui ne sera jamais semblable aux autres,” L’humanité 28 February, 2018, https://www.humanite.fr/cinema-un-ete-qui-ne-sera-jamais-semblable-aux-autres-651206.
23 “Le film a l'originalité de ne dresser aucun interdit entre les deux personnages pour les abandonner â leur seul désir. L'homophobie reste hors champ, tant les parents sont tolerants. Le spectre du sida ne flotte pas encore sur l’époque.” Adrien Gombeaud, “Appelle-moi par ton nom,” Positif, 685 (March 2018): 43.
24 Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, Queer Cinema in the World, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016): 14, 17. We should also point out here that Chiamami was censored, otherwise cut, or banned from release in several countries. What constitutes representational timidity or boldness is culturally specific, and this film still represents aberrance in many places in the world.
25 “NYFF Live: Making ‘Call Me by Your Name' | NYFF55” Film Society of Lincoln Center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCJquKusENs&feature=youtu.be, Published on 7 October 2017. Accessed 12 March 2019.
26 Sergio Rigoletto, “Against the Teleological Presumption: Notes on Queer Visibility in Contemporary Italian Film.” The Italianist 37:2 (2017): 212–227.
27 Ibid, 214.
28 Derek Duncan, “The Queerness of Italian Cinema.” In A Companion to Italian Cinema, ed. Frank Burke (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2017) 467–483.
29 Ibid, 478.
30 David Greven, “Unlovely Spectacle: D. A. Miller on Call Me By Your Name,” Film International (March 13th, 2018) http://filmint.nu/?p=23937. Accessed 26 January 2018.
31 The recent French film 120 BPM (Robin Campillo, 2017) wrestles with this same historical period and the problematic of representing gay desire, sex, and AIDS in a very different way.
32 Andrew Higson, “Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman (London: UCL Press, 1993): 109–129.
33 “Mais Ivory faisait des mélodrames marxistes sur le sexe, à partir des moeurs d’une classe dominante en déclin, quand Guadagnino fait un drame sentimental-libéral sur l’initiation au bonheur en milieu aisé : la nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était.” Luc Chessel, “Call Me By Your Name: L’éphèbe papillonne,” Libération, February 2, 2018.
34 “NYFF Live: Making ‘Call Me by Your Name' | NYFF55” Film Society of Lincoln Center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCJquKusENs&feature=youtu.be, Published on 7 October 2017. Accessed 12 March 2019.
35 Many Italian reviews of the film mention Bernardo Bertolucci. Garofalo and Holdaway document how frequently the press refer to the canon of Italian cinema as an inspiration for the director, as in references to Rossellini and Bertolucci but also Luchino Visconti, Marco Bellocchio, and Michelangelo Antonioni. The novel’s author André Aciman has said that Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968) served as inspiration for the story. “Luca Guadagnino and André Aciman with Hunter Harris: Call Me By Your Name | NYPL Author Talks” The New York Public Library, Published on 27 November 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGJcC2StRcc&feature=youtu.be, Accessed 12 March 2019.
36 Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, “Hypotheses on the Queer Middlebrow,” Middlebrow Cinema, ed. Sally Faulkner (London: Routledge 2016): 202.
37 Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Stephen Garrett, “Director Luca Guadagnino on Why ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Is Making Everyone Cry,” Observer.com, October 13, 2017, accessed 16 August, 2018, http://observer.com/2017/10/interview-luca-guadagnino-on-why-call-me-by-your-name-makes-people-cry/.
38 Franco Bruschi, Elisabetta Pagnini, and Paola Pinzauti, Cultura Turistica (Milano: Hoepli, 1987); E. Bevilacqua and E. Casti, “The Structure and Impact of International Tourism in the Veneto Region, Italy,” GeoJournal 19/3 (1989): 285–287.
39 Detailed accounts of this history include Stephen Gundle and Noelleanne O’Sullivan, “The Crisis of 1992-1994 and the Reform of the Italian Broadcasting System,” Modern Italy 1(1) 1995: 70–81; Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth-Century Italy: A Social History (London: Routledge, 2002) 197–234; and Paul Statham, “Television News and the Public Sphere in Italy: Conflicts at the Media/Politics Interface,” European Journal of Communication 11.4 (1996): 511–556.
40 “The Guardian at Tiff 2017: cast and crew of Call Me by Your Name” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NQrUgehtr0 Guardian News Published on 11 September 2017. Accessed 8 March 2019.
41 “Luca Guadagnino and André Aciman with Hunter Harris: Call Me By Your Name | NYPL Author Talks” The New York Public Library, Published on 27 November 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGJcC2StRcc&feature=youtu.be, Accessed 12 March 2019.
42 There are other ways of reading this historical trajectory of social, sexual, and political change in this era, including arguments that the 1980s and Craxismo were a culmination of 1970s leftism rather than its betrayal. See for example, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). See in particular Virno’s essay, “Do You Remember Counterrevolution?” in this volume, 241–260.
43 Emiliano Morreale, “L’educazione sentimentale secondo Guadagnino,” La Repubblica, 25tJanuary, 2018, p. 37.
44 Kornhaber, “The Shadow.”
45 Gary Needham, “Youth, Contemporary Queer Cinema, AIDS,” lecture, “Retrenching/Entrenching Youth” conference, University of Liverpool, June 5, 2018.
Additional information
Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia UP, 2010) and The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia UP, 2006). With Karl Schoonover, she is coeditor of Global Art Cinema (Oxford UP, 2010) and co-author of Queer Cinema in the World (Duke UP, 2016), which received the SCMS’s Katherine Singer Kovács Award. Her research on Italian cinema considers questions of political history and cinematic style.
Karl Schoonover is Associate Professor (Reader) of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (U of Minnesota P, 2012). With Rosalind Galt, he is coeditor of Global Art Cinema (Oxford UP, 2010) and co-author of Queer Cinema in the World (Duke UP, 2016), which received the SCMS’s Katherine Singer Kovács Award. He has written numerous articles on Italian cinema. Email: [email protected]