Nicole
I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Syl
The film is set in Northern Italy in 1983 before the AIDS crisis. The film is about a teenager named Elio Perlman who comes of age one summer. Oliver is his father's research assistant sent for a summer internship. Their romance slowly begins and unfolds during the film. Elio's parents must be the most enlightened parents ever. They even hint that they know about their son's sexuality before he tells them. They even send him and Oliver on a road trip together towards the end of the film. The romance is believable. The actors do their best to convey their attraction although somewhat discrete in Italy. Elio lives with his parents at a villa in Northern Italy year round. The summer flies by though as does the film. The film does have an abrupt ending about Oliver and Elio's relationship.
ilikeimdb
Armie Hammer found himself grossly miscast as the diffident hunk and it doesn't work for me. There's less than zero chemistry between Oliver and Elio, despite a valiant (and Academy Award nominated) acting performance by Timothee Chalamet. The entire affair reeks of forced airs in a way never required in a Merchant/Ivory concoction. When Elio gets his explicitly telegraphed call at the end, it's a 100% groaner. Well, duh. But at least Timothee gets his Oscar try at the picture's end and I can't fault his acting...but Armie Hammer is out of his element...he can't convince me he has a gay bone in his body nor has he convinced me he has any feelings for Elio, sexual or emotional. It's an intellectual effort in non-onanistic pleasures. It's impossible for me to imagine Oliver wanting to do anything in that way with Elio given Armie's performance.
michel-shook
This by far is one of the best movies I have ever seen. Although I wish the ending would have been happier, it goes based off the premise of the book so therefore it is a ending that fits. I have watched this movie on more than one occasion and it just gets better each time. If you haven't seen this, you need to!
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
First of all, beware of the fact that the film uses three languages, English, Italian and French. The French is hard to follow but yet from what I can hear it is some French. The Italian is for me an opera language and the Italian in this film does not have that music, a lot flatter. The English is standard American English and all foreign languages, I mean non-English languages are subtitled in English, still standard American English, what they call mid-Atlantic English.Second? this film is an adaptation of the eponymous novel but it cuts off all the last part, after the phone call on Hanukkah, the phone call being identified as being on Hanukah, which is from a Jew to a Jew a very cruel present, since the phone call tells Elio that the unforgettable affair he had with Oliver is not only finished but it has no hope for no future since Oliver is getting married. The point is not even that they were lovers, even friends should not behave like that. Friendship should have no end, but too often it does. And when the two friends are lovers, gay lovers mind you, that makes things a little bit tricky, but there are some more decent ways. In this case, Oliver is gross and cruel, "crudel" as they say in so many Italian operas. Third, the cutting off of the last part of the novel gives no future to Elio and we cannot know anything and of course, it makes the story a soap opera more than a real-life adventure. The last part showed that this affair had irreversible consequences for Elio. In the film, we assume it will. But the novel also made Elio meet Oliver again many years later in the USA on Oliver's campus. And that profound ending that demonstrates how impossible it is to forget what happens to you at 17 and for a young adult what happens to you with a 17-year old boy, who should have known better: just the evasive eyes of Oliver when the train is leaving. He had already closed the chapter. Not so easy in the novel. There might be some hope after all.But fifth, we miss the main conclusion of Elio's at the end of the novel:"You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist. Sometimes I have this awful picture of waking up in our house in B. and, looking out to the sea, hearing the news from the waves themselves, He died last night. We missed out on so much. It was a coma. Tomorrow I go back to my coma, and you to yours. Pardon, I didn't mean to offend - I am sure yours is no coma."I said hope, yes but for Elio, because Oliver's response is ethically and empathetically disquieting: "No, a parallel life."The film then is beautiful all along, though slightly more discreet about the real sex and going on the bike on the following morning but it remains very sentimental and superficial. Such a friendship, especially if love is added, between a younger man and a slightly (or much) older man raises many questions about the effects on both men and what such a friendship or an affair can enable both men to do that they couldn't have done before, but also what it can block that could have been brought to life. And I am not only speaking of girls and women, marriage or not marriage. I like the film but I am frustrated and I find it too emotional for a soft-hearted audience. Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
