‘Call Me By Your Name’: The Beautiful Incompleteness
Call Me By Your Name gives us everything we think we want from a love story: beauty, intelligence, desire, loss, and exquisite sadness. James Ivory crafts moments of such aesthetic perfection that we almost don't notice what's missing—the alchemy that would transform experience into transcendence. The film achieves something rare and valuable: it shows us authentic feeling. But it stops there, mistaking the recording of emotion for the transformation of consciousness.
Oliver arrives at the villa like a god descending into Eden—golden, confident, American. "You're much bigger than your picture," someone observes, and it's true in every sense. He displaces Elio from his room, his routines, his certainties. The villa before Oliver is paradise in stasis: multi-lingual breakfast conversations, afternoons transcribing music, evening swims. It takes an invader to reveal that this paradise is actually a beautiful prison. Elio calls him "the usurper," but usurpers transform kingdoms. Oliver merely visits. He awakens desire but doesn't fundamentally alter the structure of Elio's world. The peach will be plucked and consumed, but the garden remains unchanged. Paradise gets recognised through its disruption, but recognition alone isn't revolution. When Oliver leaves, the villa returns to what it was, just emptier.
Professor Perlman's lecture on ancient sculptures contains the film's most profound moment: "The Greeks and Romans didn't forbid the showing of desire. They were more tolerant." He speaks to his slides but means his son. Art becomes the permission structure for feeling—if the ancients could desire openly, perhaps we can too. The statues function as the film's attempt at divine presence, timeless objects that transcend contemporary prohibition. But statues are frozen, and frozen desire isn't the same as liberated desire. When Perlman speaks through these ancient forms, he's trying to conjure something transcendent, a force that could break through the constraints of 1983 Northern Italy. Instead, the statues remain artifacts in a slideshow. They give permission to feel but not to transform. The divine almost enters through these bronze and marble bodies, but ultimately they're just cultural footnotes, intellectual alibis for what can't be directly enacted.
"The word apricot comes from the Arabic, like the words algebra, alchemy, alcohol—things that came from the Arab world." This isn't casual etymology—it's intellectual seduction, each word a step closer to touch. The Perlman family doesn't just speak multiple languages; they use language itself as elaborate foreplay, every translation a form of intimacy. When they argue about the German translation of Tolstoy, they're really negotiating the terms of desire. But here's the problem: words about transformation aren't transformation. Saying "alchemy" doesn't make you an alchemist. The film luxuriates in its verbal sophistication—Heraclitus quoted over soft-boiled eggs, Bach transcriptions discussed like love letters—but all this beautiful language circles around experience without penetrating to its essence. The etymology lesson reveals how things travel and change meaning across cultures, but Elio and Oliver's connection doesn't undergo that kind of fundamental translation.
"Call me by your name and I'll call you by mine." This should be the moment of mystical union, where boundaries dissolve and two become something neither could be alone. Elio becomes Oliver, Oliver becomes Elio—except they don't. They exchange names like travellers swapping passports, but the core identity remains untouched. The film presents this as the ultimate intimacy, but it's actually a beautiful confusion. Real transformation doesn't happen through merger; it happens through collision that creates something entirely new. When Elio calls Oliver by his own name, he's not transcending self but multiplying it, seeing his reflection in another's body. The Greeks had a word for this—narcissism. The film mistakes this narcissistic loop for sacred union. True alchemy requires that both elements be fundamentally changed by their combination, not just temporarily confused. When they part, each returns to his original name, unchanged except for the memory of having briefly borrowed another's identity.
"We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty." Professor Perlman's speech to his son should be the film's redemptive moment, wisdom that transforms pain into understanding. He tells Elio to feel everything, to not kill the pain with the joy he's felt. It's beautiful advice for preserving experience, terrible advice for transcending it. The father validates his son's feelings—"You had a beautiful friendship"—but validation isn't transformation. He essentially tells Elio to become a beautiful museum of his own pain, to preserve rather than transmute. "I may have come close but I never had what you had," he confesses, revealing his own unlived life. This isn't wisdom; it's regret dressed as philosophy. Real transformation would teach Elio how to take this pain and turn it into something else entirely—not to preserve it like a pressed flower but to use it as fuel for becoming someone new. Instead, the father's speech amounts to: suffer beautifully and be grateful for the suffering.
"I remember everything." Then immediately: "I might be getting married this spring." The phone call from America reveals what Oliver's remembering really means—the past as artifact, carefully preserved but fundamentally inert. He's been engaged for two years, meaning their summer together existed inside an already determined future. Oliver remembers everything the way one remembers a vacation—fondly but without consequence. His marriage announcement isn't betrayal; it's revelation that nothing was actually at stake. The film treats memory as sacred, but memory without transformation is just nostalgia. When Oliver says he remembers everything, he's announcing that their experience has been successfully contained, filed away where it can't contaminate his real life. Time hasn't transformed their love into something eternal; it's revealed it as something that was always temporary, a parenthesis in Oliver's otherwise conventional narrative.
The film ends with Elio crying by the fire while his family prepares Hanukkah dinner. We watch his face for an eternal three minutes as tears fall, and we're meant to understand this as profound. But what has changed? He's the same person who began the film, just sadder. His tears are real, his pain is authentic, but authenticity without transformation is just documentation. The fire flickers across his face—fire, the eternal symbol of transformation—but nothing is being burned away and reborn. He's simply feeling what anyone would feel: loss, longing, the particular ache of first love's end. The film mistakes this feeling for meaning, as if the intensity of emotion could substitute for actual change. Behind him, life continues unchanged—his mother calls him to dinner, the family routines persist. He'll cry, he'll eat, he'll go to bed, and tomorrow he'll be exactly who he was, just carrying more sadness. The film achieves something valuable—it makes us feel—but it fails at something essential: making those feelings matter beyond themselves.
Call Me By Your Name is a beautiful film about beautiful people having beautiful experiences that lead nowhere. It captures the texture of first love with extraordinary fidelity—the nervousness, the obsession, the ecstasy, the devastation. But it mistakes the accurate recording of experience for the transformation of experience. Every element that could facilitate transcendence—the statues, the languages, the identity exchange, the father's wisdom, time itself—remains earthbound, tethered to the merely personal. The film doesn't fail because it's sad; it fails because it thinks sadness is enough. Real transformation requires that loss become gain, that death become rebirth, that the personal become universal. Instead, we get a perfectly preserved record of a feeling that changes nothing. Elio ends where he began, just with more to remember. That's not transformation—it's just time passing.
Andrew Higgs is getting his new book, The Alchemy of Screen Acting: Building a Sustainable Career in 21 Steps, ready for publication. Subscribers to Substack receive practical insights on screen acting and career development, and will be the first to know when the book becomes available. Subscribe for free using the link above.