In Call Me By Your Name (2017) Luca Guadagnino crafts a tender, slow-burning coming-of-age story of love, loss and first desire. Adapted from the 2007 novel by André Aciman, the film is set ‘somewhere in Northern Italy’, against the lush stillness of midsummer indolence in 1983. It is an emotionally and sensually charged narration of 17-year-old Elio’s (Timothée Chalamet) self-discovering affair with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old graduate student who arrives at the family summer house, a charming Italian villa, as Elio’s father’s assistant.
Elio’s summer is rolling along leisurely, filled with adolescent idleness as he pursues his multiple talents – playing music and giving ‘grownup’ readings – and explores summer romance and sex with a French girl named Marzia (Esther Garrel). Until Oliver arrives. Tall, handsome and overly confident in his ways, he appears to be the complete opposite of Elio’s teenage awkwardness and introversion. Guadagnino slowly builds a quiet, magnetic tension between the two: stolen glances, casual touches, long, loaded pauses and mixed signals accumulate and peak in an iconic – and widely memed online – dance scene.
The dancefloor of the local open-air disco is full of teenagers who sway, flirt and spin, drinks and cigarettes in their hands. Elio hangs around his Italian peers, watching Oliver’s slow dance and passionate kissing with Chiara (Victoire du Bois). ‘Is he trying to get it on with her? Elio, did he already succeed?’ they ask. ‘What do I know?’ answers Elio, locking his eyes on the couple, quietly irritated.
As the soundtrack changes from Joe Esposito’s ‘Lady, lady, lady’ to the beat of The Psychedelic Furs’ ‘Love My Way’, Oliver leaves his dancing partner, to dance alone. His dance, fleeting and unpolished, emerges as one of the pivotal scenes in the film.
His moves are loose and awkward, all elbows and weight shifts, his white Converse high-tops swaying on the floor. There’s a recklessness in his rhythm: arms flung, shoulders rolling, hips off-beat. Seemingly, he isn’t dancing to seduce, it feels more like he’s dancing for himself, eyes closed, almost like trying to shake something off. It’s as if his body can’t quite contain the energy inside him, so it spills out, messy and honest, in a dance-like-nobody’s-watching kind of way. But Elio is watching.
The camera assumes Elio’s point of view, keeping Oliver mostly cropped off the dancing crowd, narrowing our focus on his fiddly dance. There is no eye contact between the two, no invitation, no declaration.
‘You can look but you can’t touch, I don’t think I like you much’ – the lyrics of ‘Love My Way’ eloquently articulate their dynamic.
Released in 1982, one year before the storyline’s timeframe, ‘Love My Way’ has been associated with queer subtext. Richard Butler, the lead singer of The Psychedelic Furs explicitly said in an interview that the song was addressing people ‘who are fucked up about their sexuality, and says: Don’t worry about it. It was originally writer for gay people.’ It is a song of resistance, self-acceptance and self-discovery: ‘It is a new road, I follow where my mind goes.’
The song becomes the turning point for Elio: its upbeat lightness comes in contrast to his internal turmoil, of longing, jealousy and sense of exclusion. It is the moment where his feelings for Oliver stop being abstract and become undeniable. He finishes his cigarette and skips into the dancefloor alongside Marzia, showing off his own silly and awkward moves, casually leading their way towards Oliver. Marzia becomes his ‘gateway’ onto the dancefloor, allowing him to edge closer to his object of desire, without yet exposing himself.
In that brief dance, they orbit each other without touching, each one seemingly focused on their female partners. They literally dance around each other and their feelings, as they have been doing all summer. In that moment on the dancefloor, Elio stops being an observer of desire and takes his first awkward and yet definitive steps towards it, beginning his irreversible journey from boyhood to heartbreak. ●