Timothée Chalamet on Filming 'Call Me By Your Name,' a Sundance Standout

It makes sense that director Luca Guadagnino—whose earlier films include I Am Love—would cast actor Timothée Chalamet to play the part of Elio Perlman, the precocious 17-year-old son of a professor at the heart of the film adaptation of André Aciman’s heady summer romance novel, Call Me by Your Name. Like Elio, Chalamet, who was 20 at the time of filming, is quite gifted: already fluent in French, he learned to speak Italian and play both the piano and guitar for the role. Call Me by Your Name follows Elio and Oliver, a visiting scholar played by the dashing Armie Hammer, as the two develop a passionate, complex love affair.

Playing out against the backdrop of a Mediterranean seaside town, the two soon engage in an extended erotic tête-à-tête that is, at turns, lascivious and innocent. When asked for his thoughts on the movie’s frank portrayal of the pair’s sexual encounters, Chalamet is quick to look beyond the sensational appeal. “First and foremost,” he underscores, “Call Me by Your Name is a story about love, and first loves, and unrequited, and then, later, requited love.” As with the fate of many a summer romance, Elio and Oliver’s ends. While the two orbit each other in the years to come, it is Elio alone who longs for Oliver. Nora Ephron perhaps summed up the topic of summer love best: “Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.”

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