“Chiamami col tuo nome… Call Me By Your Name”

This weekend I finally watched the film ...

Today, Fr. Z posts about it.  It's being hailed as poetic in Italy.  Dolci.  Fr. Z calls it 'highly morally offensive '.  I agree that it is.

I had the film on DVD for months, but I wasn't too eager to watch it, not sure how graphic it was.  I didn't finish watching it because it was not only somewhat graphic, but creepily suggestive and almost seductive.  There were a couple of parts which reminded me of what happened to me in my youth, and I felt ashamed.  Therefore, if something happened to you in your youth, I would avoid the film entirely.

Sets and cinematography are indeed poetic, or artful.  The film moves very slowly and ponderously ... yet it the portrayals strike me as trivial - even boring.  The characters are not engaging and have little depth.  They spend a lot of time engaging in heterosexual flirting and recreational sex with women before the two men come together.  The older one supposedly showing the other one how to do it?  

Then they fall in love, and the parents don't mind, nor did they mind their 17 year old engaging in sex with girls.  They were very evolved parents, permissive and accepting of anything their son chose to do.  They appear to be completely amoral - albeit not debauched.  

Fr. Z says the film is basically about pederasty.  I suppose it is a romantic pederasty story - they fall in love - more or less initiated by the younger man, the 17 year old, who appears much more boyish than his age.  One can call it pederasty - but that also lifts it out of the LGBTQ labeling system.  It separates it from homosexuality, if you will.

How?  First of all, the long build-up to the passionate romance between the two males is peppered with heterosexual encounters - flirting and dating and recreational sex.  Slowly the younger man's interest focuses upon the older man's presence.  He's curious about him, but Armie Hammer's character appears completely uninterested in the younger boy-man.  In fact he is rude to him.  Yet suddenly the boy-man expresses his desire as curiosity about male to male sex.  Then it happens after some resistance on the part of the older male.  Almost immediately they fall in love - surprisingly comfortable with kissing and fondling one another afterward.

So normal, huh?  Not gay at all.  His parents have gay friends the family adores yet make fun of them.  The son calls them Sonny and Cher.  So they are gay, but the son and his older male lover are not.  They are normal because they were interested in girls but just happened to fall in love experimenting in male on male sex.  They aren't queer like the parent's friends.  It took about an hour and a half to make that clear, while the audience is expected to feel the passion, feel the love, between otherwise straight men having sex.   It's a dishonest attempt to normalize such same sex relationships, which somehow aren't gay.  (Because all gay men are not interested in young men and boys.)

My point is that it is a film about man-boy love - not just pederasty, as academics or moral theologians would describe it.  It is of course about that - but pederasty has almost become an archaic term pretty much describing an act or status rather than a relationship.  Man-boy love is about gay men and boys in a relationship.  Like "Christopher and Don" - the love story between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy.  The film is strange propaganda for man-boy love as something entirely different from lgbtq life.

I never finished the film.

Chris and Don.