Timothée Chalamet (timo-TAY shall-a-MAY, covered in Lady Bird, where he said to Lady Bird, "You're gonna have so much unspecial sex in your life.") exquisitely gives all of Elio's fine-tuned emotions, up to and including a long, long take at the end where he stares near the camera. The actor can play piano and guitar and it looks like he's doing his own playing. More on that in a moment. Both Chalamet and his co-star Armie Hammer (last blogged for Nocturnal Animals), who plays Oliver, are so gorgeous it's a bonus that they're as good as they are. Michael Stuhlbarg (after I wrote about him in Arrival he was in The Shape of Water and The Post, not to mention 8 episodes of Fargo season 3) is Elio's father and Oliver's boss, projecting warmth and humor.
Director Luca Guadagnino (most recently in these pages for A Bigger Splash) mixes his native Italian with English and French, all subtitled so non-tri-linguists won't miss anything (I hate it when someone has decided that dialogue in a foreign language is so incidental that they leave out the subtitles)--Elio's mother is French and the locals are Italian. The acclaimed 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman was adapted by James Ivory (best known as the Oscar-nominated director of A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993), he has written only a few screenplays, including The Guru (1969), Maurice (1987), and Le Divorce (2003)). Imdb also claims that the director is uncredited for work on the screenplay. I have no opinion on that.
One reviewer said that the leading roles could have been played by, as I recall, mailboxes, and he would still have loved it. That's a credit to the glorious locations and magnificent cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (he shot Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) which I've been meaning to see since its nominations and awards back then).
Most of the filmmakers are earning nominations and awards, some of which are on my list. Chalamet, winner of a few already, is up for a Screen Actors Guild, or SAG, Male Lead Actor award, to be awarded and broadcast tomorrow night, Sunday the 21st.
Like Guadagnino's previous works, there is no composer. Instead we have songs, ranging from classical to Italian and British pop of the time to two new Sufjan Stevens tracks, all on this youtube compilation and named in full here. Apparently Chalamet didn't do his own playing. I was startled to hear a piano number with excerpts of the one classical piece I played the most as a child and can still sort of muddle through slowly, Muzio Clementi's Sonatina in C Major, op. 36 no. 1 (here it is played fast by a professional). Turns out Erik Satie wrote the Sonatine Bureaucratique as a spoof of Clementi's sonatina.
Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences, averaging 96 and 88% (with the latter up by one just since yesterday) are with us on this one.
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