Call Me By Your Name
A movie that takes place in a beautiful serene setting, the countryside of northern Italy...where the living is easy, and one can relax, soaking up the sun and enjoying the idyllic nature of the setting. It seems almost dream like, and that's what I think people respond to. But, if you think about the story premise, it's very similar to the real events that brought Kevin Spacey's career to a tumbling halt. At the heart of the story is a fantasy that pedophilia is OK. We have a 17 year old boy who's seduced by a much older man who's very worldly and in control, he's a player and pushes the right buttons to get the boy to fall for him. When he's done with the boy he goes back to his life and gets engaged to be married. For him it was a sexual conquest, but for the boy it was emotionally heart breaking.
I can respect a film like
Moonlight, as it seemed like a personal story of a gay youth growing up to deal with the harsh world he was born to. But with
Call Me By Your Name, it propagandas us to think older men having relations with minors is OK. It does this mostly at the end of the movie when the boy's father not only approves of the relationship with an adult but admits to wishing he had such a relationship when he was young. In this way the film is like Woody Allen's
Manhattan, where a much older Woody has a sexual relationship with a underage teen girl...and no one in the film questions the morality of having sex with a juvenile, which would be illegal. Both films present the film makers fantasy. I wonder if Kevin Spacey finds it odd that Call Me By Your Name earned an Academy Award nomination for best picture, whilst he gets fired from his acting jobs?
For reference here's an excerpt from my review of
Manhattan:
Manhattan (1979)
Woody Allen's masturbatory ode to himself...a film that has become seminal in the annals of celebrated and obscure film reviewers around the world...Yes Virginia, there's life outside of Manhattan, but one wonders if Woody is aware of anything outside of his own existence. Nay make that outside of his own fantasies.
For all the cinematic artistry, Manhattan plays out like one of Woody's personal fantasies, that's his auteur's stamp. Woody Allen is Isaac a successful but neurotic New York intellectual who's magnetic to women and despite looking like a peeping tom, manages to marry a young and beautiful Meryl Streep, who we find out turns lesbian and divorces Isaac. The 43 year old then has a fling with a 17 year old played by Mariel Hemingway also 17 in real life at the time of filming.
The much older man involved with a teenage girl could have had so many possibilities for exploration with this taboo theme. Woody, who wrote this film could have shown the relationship as having some type of consequences or made some type of statement.
But instead the movie presents the friends of Isaac (Woody Allen) as having no real objections to a relationship that would be considered pedophile-ism in the real world and could result in statuary rape charges. But no, not here in Woody's make believe world. Woody the person, wants to bring his fantasy to life and so has the characters readily accepting his strange love.
And that's one of the weak points of Manhattan...it fails to explore this relationship and it's consequences. In fact none of the relationships seem to say much about anything, they just simply happen so that Woody can hang his intellectual name dropping script onto the back of the actors.
Reply to Topic
). Still, I think it's important to remember that others have different beliefs. It certainly wouldn't stop me from enjoying the movie, especially when many of my favorite characters are murderers, rapists, or child diddlers. I think it was supposed to be borderline, a forbidden romance so to speak, forbidden because not everyone would be ok with it. I thought the movie was a success.
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