call me by your name (d. luca guadagnino; w. james ivory)

Guadagnino’s biggest hit to date is a film which many people I’ve met have told me moved them inordinately, but which left me strangely cold. It’s a coming of age tale, as the adolescent Elio explores his sexuality during a long hot Italian Summer. The film, employing a James Ivory script, takes its time to play itself out, with the rhythms matching those of the long Summer days that the script inhabits. Guadagnino adopts his trademark lush cinematography and lavish music, but the narrative itself is slimmed down, homing in on the comings and goings of Elio and the older American he falls in love with, Oliver.

Towards the end of A Bigger Splash, there’s a slightly uncomfortable storyline relating to African immigrants arriving in South Italy. Guadagnino is a sybarite, one can’t help thinking, and politics, or at least ‘social realism’ politics, isn’t really his bag. Call Me By Your Name makes no bones about being a primarily bourgeois piece of art. Elio’s archeologist father gets his kicks from discovering aristocratic Roman treasures which are salvaged from the sea floor. In this sense, Call Me By Your Name, an eminently apolitical work of art, might be said to be completely honest in its intentions. However, as a result, I found myself engaging less and less with the dreamy protagonist. Sure, the flowering of late adolescence is driven by a sexual impulse, but it’s also an age when other impulses flower: the idealistic or the political urge. It’s easy to understand why Call Me By Your Name, which captures Elio’s sexual anxiety with a surgical precision, has seduced an audience that identifies with Elio’s angst. We all went through that stage at one point or another. (And, given this, it’s also easy to understand how the story is far more than a “gay” story, as might be said to be the case with Haigh’s Weekend, for example). But the net effect is that Elio ends up feeling like a hollow character, sheltered and indulged by his almost creepily empathetic parents. 

Of course, no film can have it all and it might seem churlish to quibble about a lack of political perspective in what is essentially a glorified love story. But Elio’s self-absorption ultimately seemed to this viewer to make him a banal one-dimensional hero. The film is, to all intents and purposes, a Rohmerian fable, but the characters lack the self-doubt which Rohmer’s characters evince, which is what gives Rohmer’s characters their charm, the way in which they achieve their epiphany in spite of their doubts as to whether they really deserve it. Another recent film which could be a point of reference is Santiago Mitre’s El Estudiante, a film which boldly embraces its protagonist’s shallowness in way Call Me By Your Name shies away from. 

a bigger splash (d luca guadagnino, w david kajganich)

Since arriving in London I’ve seen two films. The contrast between them seems to encapsulate the problems of scale and ambition that British cinema faces. One is Stephen FIngleton’s The Survivalist. A worthy, sturdy piece of filmmaking which seems entrapped by its simplicity, resolutely refusing to lend any kind of global dimension to its post-apocalyptic landscape, no matter how effectively plotted and filmed it is. A film that leaves with you with the feeling of something austere and underwhelming. The other was Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, nominally an Italian film, but more of a pudding, featuring Brits, Americans, Italians a Belgian and, somewhat awkwardly, immigrants from undisclosed African countries. 

For all its imperfections, and there are a few, including the final flawed 20 minutes, A Bigger Splash is an engrossing film, marked by its very ambition as a distinctive piece of filmmaking. The story is essentially simple, four people holed up in an idyllic Italian hideaway, with their various connections and dependencies. The outcomes are not unpredictable, (what else can happen in these circumstances apart from fucking and fighting?), but the storytelling refuses to tow an easy line, constantly kicking against the inevitability of its characters’ destinies. There is a price to pay for this inventiveness. The refugee storyline feels half-baked; there’s a hint of something Haneke-esque to be wrought from their presence on this outpost of Europe, and the one moment where Schoenaerts and Johnson are met by a group of uneasy men has potency, but in the end the strand feels like a red herring. Similarly, the final twenty minutes are a disappointment; this film should not descend into the TV mechanics of a murder enquiry. It has had too much going for it upto then. 

However, these flaws are forgivable within the bigger picture. Luca Guadagnino displays the same delicate touch for the nuances of personal relationships he showed in his previous film, I Am Love. This time he pushes the characters to their limits. No more so than in a show-stopping performance by Ralph Fiennes as Harry, the verbose, larger-than-life record producer. Fiennes is one of those actors whose appeal, from the point of view of a recondite Englishman, is sometimes hard to grasp. Neither Bond-esque nor subtle enough to be a character actor. But here, he steps out of his shadow (or perhaps into it) to deliver a rip-roaring, relentlessly annoying character whose inability to control his particular lust for life leads to scenes of toe-curling embarrassment but also a weird kind of post-middle-age pathos. Why shouldn’t the self-absorbed middle-aged dads dance with the same sense of abandonment as the nubile youngsters? There’s something glorious about Harry’s refusal to bow to the rules of refinement, even if you know spending more than 15 minutes in his unedited company would be a kind of living hell. It’s a remarkable performance, which offers a counter-balance to Swinton’s more glacial Thin White Duke; allowing the two younger characters to tail the older characters like formula 1 drivers looking for the moment they’ll overtake. 

As a portrayal of post-middle aged pre-dementia, Guadagnino’s film cannot be topped. Its characters parachute through the screen with the splendour and abrasiveness which is normally reserved, these days, for 3-D effects. As though the director is reminding us (and even himself, given the film’s iffy ending) that cinema is just as much about character and story as it is about visuals or coherence. That you need to take a risk if you want to achieve anything exceptional. That the straight and narrow are all very well, but they are straight and narrow and they offer scant help of emotional rescue when you are most in need of it. 

i am love (d&w luca guadagnino)

It's a while now since I spent much time in Italy. A country with which I developed a strange, sometimes ambivalent relationship. My theory, which is probably not original, is that as a country it realised a long time ago what life was all about. Having got its empire building out of the way early, its people collectively took stock and decided that they lived in possibly the most beautiful country on the planet, with potentially the finest cuisine in the universe, and arguably the best looking boys and girls in the galaxy. In other words, all the things that really mattered in life were already to hand. Over the centuries they have their occasional moments of aberration, and they also have a keen awareness of the relationship between wealth and power which can help in the acquisition of even more beauty and even finer food, but essentially it's an introspective culture. With so much within reach it has no need to go looking elsewhere.

Generalisations along national lines are, of course, invidious, flawed and potentially dangerous. Which doesn't mean they're going to stop being made. Nowhere more so than in art. Guadagnino's film, for which words such as sumptuous or operatic might have been invented, seems pre-eminently Italian. Quite apart from the impeccable attention to interiors, costume and design; the measured use of both cityscape and landscape; the elegant looks of its attractive cast; the leading lady, Tilda Swinton, falls for a chef, in large part seduced by his way with a prawn. Food is an art too, and it seems completely appropriate that Emma should fall for Antonio's sensibilities as communicated through his lunchtime menu, deliberately chosen to impress.

All this implies a case of style over substance, a criticism easy to make of an introspective culture. However, Guadagnino directs with a concern to ensure that his audience do more than merely gawp at his pretty pictures. Swinton herself is not actually Italian, but Russian (somehow cleverer than her being English, for reasons too complex to explore here), someone who has learnt to be as Italian if not more so than the Italians themselves, so much so she claims to have forgotten her Russian name. This allows the script some leverage to break away from its Italian-ness, to step back and comment on the way the culture runs the risk of becoming solipsistic. In addition, there's a subplot about the the family business being sold out within a new, borderless world of capital, which threatens to render nationality (and tradition and even loyalty) meaningless. There may be something pretentious about this strand, with its echoes of The Godfather, but it is indicative of a filmmaker seeking to be bold, to explore the themes that underpin the aesthetics and beliefs upon which the world of the film would appear to be founded, aesthetics and beliefs that lead to Emma's eventual expulsion/ flight from the family bosom.

I Am Love isn't scared to run the risk of being flawed, (the final sequence seems oddly melodramatic, like something out of a Colombian telenovela), but that's an indication of its ambition. Whilst a beautiful film, its also a meditation upon a culture of beauty, which is perhaps the superficial of the world, rather than the essential. (Don't tell Keats). Its boldness extends to its cinematography and its editing, which seeks by and large not to dwell on the scenarios its created, but throw them away, in so doing imparting a lack of reverence which counteracts all the careful composition of the director's screen, and breathes life into something which could so easily have been moribund, seemingly just for show.