Call Me by Your Name (Sometime in the Future?)

Around the one-hour and 20-minute mark of Call Me By Your Name, we finally see the beginnings of a moment between Elio and Oliver, the two protagonists and love interests. It is midnight after a party, and the two of them are standing side-by-side on a balcony. All you can hear is their breathing, a ruffling of shirts, and the high-pitched chirping of crickets. Oliver says, “I’m glad you came,” and lightly brushes his hand (holding a cigarette) over Elio’s before the two of them amble back inside the room. It’s summer in 1980s Italy, and both characters are wearing loose-fitting clothes, Oliver in a green rolled-up button-down and Elio in a white t-shirt and jeans. The camera lingers on their bodies as they slowly learn to get closer, Elio starting to lean more on Oliver and eventually, fully embracing him, hands in hair as they kiss and become more comfortable with each other. The intimacy increases as they get into bed, the camera spending a long time on their feet and then moving up to their bodies, and start to climb on top of each other, their breathing getting heavy and movements becoming more frantic. As Oliver strips off his belt, the camera pans away to look outside the window at the trees, only the sound of their breathing and faint crickets audible. 

I found this scene a really interesting illustration of both Rodriguez’s “queer gestures” and Muñoz’s concept of a queer utopia. Although this scene represents a fulfillment of the potential for queer love (i.e. sex, or the implication of sex), this is not the first time that we sense queer undertones. Because they rarely speak to each other, some viewers may read Elio and Oliver’s budding relationship as platonic and far from the realm of sexual. And yet, what I think makes the film so powerful is its emphasis on queer gestures, that “socially legible and highly codified form of kinetic communication” that brings the two subtly and slowly together into a “we,” even if they don’t directly interact in ways customarily read as romantic (Rodriguez 6). So much of the film is predicated on those relational movements— the squeeze of a shoulder, the touching of a peach, a glance at a party—that by the time this specific scene rolls around, viewers already feel like the two have been involved in a kind of sensual, erotic play (and that this is the final, ultimate climax of those gestures). But even in this scene, gestures play a large role. When Elio moves his foot over Olivers, when they cling to each other, wrestling almost, they “counteract demands for corporeal conformity” and leave open space for a queer interpretation of the motions of their bodies (6). 

Moving to Muñoz, part of this film’s appeal (and maybe also what makes it problematic) is its general tone of “not yet here” or “almost,” sharing the sentiment that “we may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Muñoz 1). A lot of this film just feels like waiting, but it is a waiting that is “laden with potentiality” (Rodriguez 5). Occuring at midnight, in that liminal space and time between the past and the future, this scene is situated perfectly in a moment that is “primarily about futurity and hope” (Muñoz 11). Its dark, isolated setting and limited diagetic sound also help create a spatially recognizable “queer horizon,” away from the oppressive gaze of others. This scene is also ripe with a sense of awkward hesitation and nervousness as the two characters fumble around each other, learning to touch each other in new ways and be together. This aligns with what Muñoz seems to be arguing for, that instead of being concerned fully with the here and now, there is a collapse in boundaries of what is and what could be; the trepidation of their actions—and the panning away of the camera— embodies his concept for queer utopia as “subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity,” a future that is excitable, but not fully in reach (16).