Read the full article on Firstpost, here: http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/call-me-by-your-name-lolita-and-taming-discomfiting-desires-on-the-big-screen-4324893.html
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name has been in the news for a while, most recently because it was nominated for four Academy Awards (including Best Picture). And it is a very good film, a textbook example for what a director does – that is, orchestrating mood and texture and a tone of performance. But it’s also very different from the novel it’s based on, by André Aciman. I read the book after watching the movie, and was startled by how much “mainstreaming” has been done – either due to squeamishness (the “will we turn off audiences?” question) or a sort of better-safe-than-sorry rationale with an eye on the box office. (“You don’t want to end up in a space in which people giggle,” Guadagnino said).
I’m talking not just about the tweaking of the now-famous peach scene (where Elio masturbates into the fruit, and the subsequent actions of his lover, Oliver), but also the omission of the following passage from the book: “We had never taken a shower together. We had never even been in the same bathroom together. ‘Don’t flush,” I’d said. ‘I want to look.’ What I saw brought out strains of compassion, for him, for his body, for his life, which suddenly seemed so frail and vulnerable. ‘Our bodies won’t have any secrets now,’ I said as I took my turn and sat down… [He] kissed me on the mouth, and, pressing and massaging my tummy with the flat of his palm, watched the whole thing happen.”
Writing in Vulture, E Alex Jung, put it beautifully. “It’s a bizarre, beautiful scene, precisely because Elio wants to get to a place where even the most private, mundane bodily functions become acts of intimacy.” The part where Oliver helps Elio vomit is not there, either. “I opened my mouth. Before I knew it I was sick as soon as he touched my uvula. But what a solace to have my head held, what selfless courage to hold someone’s head while he’s vomiting. Would I have had it in me to do the same for him?”
Continued at the link above.
Copyright ©2018 Firstpost.
Baradwaj Rangan 
Sushila Ravindranath
January 29, 2018
Baddy, first post doesn’t open
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Vivek narain
January 29, 2018
The heathen pervert Caligula is far superior to these queer kikes, Rome can do without.
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eternaloxymoron
January 29, 2018
Thank you so much for writing this sir. Mainstreaming unfortunately ruins so many movie adaptations including Joanne Harris’ Chocolat which I read recently and the movie adaptation was such a disappointment. Plotlines were changed to make it morally unambiguous which went against the soul of the book. Though I’m yet to see CMBYM (I doubt it will release in the small town where I live) but I have read the book (audiobook narrated by Armmie Hammer) and it is a powerful read and I couldn’t get it out of my head for days. I was looking forward to the movie but now after reading this I hope they haven’t messed it up too much. In the meanwhile I will find myself a hardcopy of the book and read it again.
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Ankit V Nahar
January 29, 2018
BR – I saw the movie recently and thought that the movie wanted us to root for Elio more than Oliver. Oliver looks selfish in the manner he is presented. After reading the passages you refer to in the article, Olivier seems caring, vulnerable and loving. Would like to know your thoughts on Oliver.
Regards,
Ankit
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Vivek narain
January 29, 2018
Ankit’s query is reminiscent of Alice’s dilemma of who was more villainous, Carpenter or Walrus. John winston lennon, who wrote and sang,’I am the walrus’ later admitted that he was naive as to the villainy of walrus. He dropped the middle name of ‘winston’, and i have probed this angle that goes back to various skullduggeries of Churchill.
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Doba
January 30, 2018
Absolutely loved this article. Thank you.
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brangan
January 30, 2018
eternaloxymoron: Oh, they haven’t “messed it up at all.” It’s a beautiful film. It’s just that it’s also a “safe” film, and the book is so very different…
Ankit V Nahar: Yes, the film does make us see Elio more as (this is the case in the book too) it’s all told from his POV. So till the ice breaks, Oliver does come across like a remote figure — but once that happens, I didn’t find him “selfish.
Forgot to mention in the piece a funny thing that happens when you read a book after watching the movie. The characters are no longer shaped in your head. They have the faces of the actors playing them 🙂
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mrinalnarayan
January 31, 2018
BR – Lovely article. Wish you could keep writing on Non-Indian releases regularly.
Coming to Oliver’s character, I didn’t find him selfish either (in the movie). I got reminded a bit of Jessie from VTV. I understand that the society and hence the mindset of the people are completely different in both the movies. But what made me draw the comparison is the vulnerability of these two characters in the respective movies. They don’t want to fall into something that might mess it up for their partners. But couldn’t stop doing it anyway.
And I feel it might make the viewers wanting for more out of these characters when presented on screen. Think, its a slightly tough one to pull it off. And again, am not comparing the actors here, to make myself clear.
Interestingly, there is also an age difference. Call Me By Your Name is an excellent cinema. Couldn’t stop thinking about it.
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Prashila
January 31, 2018
BR, loved this one. And I am glad the pieces in this series are being less theoretical and essayish and more accessible. And you have made me start on my reading of Call me by your Name, so Yay.
But on Lolita, I am afraid I don’t quite agree with you. I think Lolita stands where it does all these years later is only because of what Nabokov has ‘written’, if you know what I mean. In wrong hands it would be a pathetic tale of exploitation or probably a particular kind of soft porn. The writing makes us imagine and then makes us look away. I am tempted to argue what new would any movie adaptation of such brilliance have to offer, but I’ll put that thought away.
From the book: “I sat beside [Lolita] just behind that neck and that hair, and unbuttoned my overcoat and for sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate in the school play, had [Lolita] put her inky, chalky, red-knuckled hand under the desk.”
But by expressly enacting a scene like the above, what more are we getting to know about Humbert that we don’t already know. In the novel too, this is a Nabokov winking at us scene, one of the lighter ones where Humbert is basically ‘chance marofying’. I would certainly not say that without this scene, the movie is ‘missing out’ on something that takes away from the soul of the book’s adaptation. It is at once disgusting and comical, and we already know that by now, don’t we?
Or take the below passage
“I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent),
I haven’t watched both the movies so don’t know if anyone of them actually did include this scene, but this would be such an incomplete portrayal without Humbert’s ‘soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent’. As I read this passage, I see the soul which is why I go on reading the novel, increasingly horrified but also fascinated, but would I see the same in the movie scene with a middle aged man holding a 12 year old naked girl in his arms no matter how aesthetically it is shown. Shudder… or maybe that is just me.
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Rahul
February 2, 2018
BR can I request you to be more careful re blatantly racist language in Vivek’s second post here?
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brangan
February 3, 2018
Ankit: This writer seems to have felt about Oliver the way you did:
https://thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.in/2018/02/luca-guadagninos-call-me-by-your-name.html
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Ankit Nahar
February 4, 2018
BR – Thank you for the link. My views are similar as that of the reviewer. In the last scene of the movie, we never get to see Oliver but only hear his voice. The fact that Oliver moved on so quickly from the relationship and also the way he sounded, it left an impression to me as though it was just a fling for Oliver and nothing more.
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ramitbajaj01
March 2, 2018
When the father says at the end that he too had something similar back then, but he never went ahead with it, and that he wants his son to live his life the way he wants, surely he was being progressive and all, but wasn’t he also making homosexuality a choice, that, he chose one way, but his son could choose the other way? Isn’t this point of view regressive?
And how odd is it that a person like Elio is so comfortably bisexual, and that he gets attracted towards someone like Oliver, who is also so conveniently bisexual! As if it was not enough, even Elio’s father is coming across as bisexual! Talk about co incidents!
But, was Elio’s father really a bisexual? If in his youth, he had felt mild attraction towards someone, does that mean he is bisexual? But again, science says that all of us are born bisexuals, but our dominant orientation remains in charge most of the times, and we associate ourselves with heterosexuality or homosexuality. However, in some people, this dominance is not clearly clearly spread out, so, they become bisexuals. But that doesn’t mean that heterosexuals or homosexuals would never feel any attraction towards same or opposite gender, respectively, in all the situations. Very mild attraction towards all sorts of beings is very natural, but that doesn’t give us the right to speak on behalf of people who have more than mild level of attraction in that zone. The father in the movie, by speaking about the thing, that he is not fully involved in, showcased his reductionist and regressive point of view, in my opinion (because, if he was really into it, he won’t have been able to hold himself back). If however, he really was a bisexual, then that, as I said earlier, is the mother of all co incidents!
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siddarthsen
March 29, 2018
Here you go, BR: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/27/james-ivory-ismail-merchant-love-secret-call-me-by-your-name-nudity
James Ivory is pretty angry at Luca for not taking it far enough, even though the screenplay did!
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Ramit
April 28, 2020
The next book, Find Me, is divided into 3 parts. First part is okay, second is not. Third is wow. Just wow. This part is the reason why I picked up this book at the first place.
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Ramit
June 19, 2022
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