Call Me by Your Name

Call Me by Your Name strikes me as an important achievement, but one that doesn’t speak to me as much as I had hoped, at least not as much as Carol or Moonlight, the other recent queer crossover hits that are inevitably offered for comparison. The gulf between its adolescent protagonist’s cosmopolitan intellectualism and my own experiences as a teen may be a factor, and it doesn’t help that I am definitely not a fan of Sufjan Stevens. But mostly it felt overlong, especially for something framed as a fond, formative memory, which in retrospect would have seemed to last only an instant. That said, its admirable complexity of emotion probably needed that time to unravel, and Michael Stuhlbarg’s extraordinary monologue caps the whole thing nicely. There’s just something it’s not doing for me that I can’t put my finger on.