I first watched Call Me by Your Name in the summer of 2020, when the world felt like a dream, and my father was enjoying his last months of life before cancer came to collect the rent. I can’t remember even thinking much about the fact everything was going to come to an end eventually; autumn would arrive, the pandemic would end, school would return, a life would draw to a close. Perhaps I did not have the emotional experience to comprehend any of these things, and so it never occurred to me to try. The film adaptation of Call Me by Your Name, by nature of the medium, also does not have much capacity to consider Elio’s dread of the summer’s end. We cannot read his internal monologue on the screen. However, the novel (read last week in two sittings, one on a restless night and the other sprawled out on my leather jacket in St James Park during one of those brief breaths of English sun in March) is increasingly punctuated by this dread in the final one hundred pages like little anxious commas disrupting an otherwise glorious sentence. Sobering and sad, every time one of these commas wormed its way in ( ‘Autumn was just around the corner’, ‘I suddenly realised we were on borrowed time’, ‘I had always found a way to avoid counting the days’,) I felt as though I had just seen the sun peeking through the window after staying up all night. The book reminding you of the fantasy- how cruel!
The film is a rather nice respite from this in the final segments. For a few hours, we can sit like children eating up the beautiful Italian summer and washing it down with apricot juice; the bad ending comes as a terrible shock, but it is over quickly, and we can always start the film over again. It is the cruelty of the novel (and life) that often we must sit by and grimly anticipate the inevitably cruel ending one hundred pages before it arrives. The challenge, then, is to somehow prevent this dread from detracting from the moment, something I think our generation finds particularly difficult, with our hyper awareness of how we might look back on ourselves in a year or so’s time. It is tempting to be nostalgic for last Tuesday, particularly when Snapchat has a digital archive of memories which remind you daily of what would have otherwise been a mundane moment lost to your consciousness forever. I digress.
Four summers ago, I loved the film for because I, too, was lounging in the sun, reading books over eggs in the morning and entertaining innocent dreams of happy endings; a small part of me knew that my ‘minutes were numbered, but I didn’t dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but didn’t care to reach for the mileposts’. The summer did end, though, as did what I now generally think of as the before section of my life. The after section has made the inevitability of a cruel ending as familiar to me as the drying out of summer leaves in September. On reading the novel last week, I found it was the dread of the end itself which I could relate to the most.
My engagement with the story now, then, is joining in the struggle to enjoy these dream-moments in our adult lives without allowing the dread to take to much hold. Or is it the dread of the end which makes the fleeting joy of the present so perfect? How wonderful a moment must be, after all, if it a future that compared is incomprehensible.
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