Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)

Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name

Oliver: Armie Hammer
Elio: Timothée Chalamet
Mr. Perlman: Michael Stuhlbarg
Annella Perlman: Amira Casar
Marzia: Esther Garrel
Chiara: Victoire Du Bois
Mafalda: Vanda Capriolo
Anchise: Antonio Rimoldi
Mounir: André Aciman
Isaac: Peter Spears

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: James Ivory
Based on a novel by André Aciman
Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Production design: Samuel Deshors
Film editing: Walter Fasano

Nobody dies or gets beaten up in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, which makes it something of an advance on previous Oscar-nominated films about same-sex relationships such as Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), which carried the implicit warning that being gay is dangerous. On the other hand, that's because the film's characters are people in a supposedly tolerant milieu, an haute middle-class academic family, not cowboys or residents of housing projects. Otherwise, we're still dealing with sexual "deviance" and its societal consequences, which in Elio's case include a sensitive and well-meaning Talk from his father, a phone call in which Oliver announces that he's going to marry a woman he's been seeing for a while, and an extended closing shot of Elio weeping into the fireplace. Don't get me wrong: I like Call Me by Your Name, in which Guadagnino and his handsome, skilled actors beautifully sustain a mood of sexual tension throughout the film. The problem I have with it is that it seems compromised by what its producers and director believe a mainstream film is allowed to show audiences these days. Put it another way, if the characters in the scene in which two people consummate their relationship were male and female, would the director have panned away from the bed to a window for a lingering view of a tree? That's a cliché as old as movie love scenes, redolent of a bygone era of censorship. So instead of watching even a discreetly filmed moment of sexual congress, which we've grown used to in "straight" movies -- all deftly angled closeups of apparently nude bodies and orgasmic faces -- we're treated like easily shocked children. It's especially noticeable after the director has already taken the usual discreet approach twice in scenes in which Elio has sex with Marzia. Reportedly, James Ivory's Oscar-winning screenplay specified full nudity and more explicit sex in the scenes with Elio and Oliver, but Guadagnino shied away. The result is a kind of emasculation of their relationship, turning Call Me by Your Name into all foreplay and no climax.

A Room With a View (James Ivory, 1985)

Rosemary Leach, Daniel Day-Lewis, Simon Callow, Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves in A Room With a View

Lucy Honeychurch: Helena Bonham Carter
Charlotte Bartlett: Maggie Smith
George Emerson: Julian Sands
Mr. Emerson: Denholm Elliott
The Rev. Mr. Beebe: Simon Callow
Eleanor Lavish: Judi Dench
Cecil Vyse: Daniel Day-Lewis
Mrs. Honeychurch: Rosemary Leach
Freddy Honeychurch: Rupert Graves

Director: James Ivory
Screenplay: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Based on a novel by E.M. Forster
Cinematography: Tony Pierce-Roberts
Production design: Brian Ackland Snow, Gianni Quaranta
Music: Richard Robbins
Costume design: Jenny Beavan, John Bright

James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant had a collaboration that began with the formation of Merchant Ivory Productions in 1961 and lasted until Merchant's death in 2005. It usually included the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The trio developed a reputation for literary adaptations that were beautifully filmed with opulent sets and costumes and a gallery of celebrated stars -- most of them British. But the trouble with developing a distinctive style is that you can become a cliché: "Merchant Ivory" eventually became a label for a film that was tastefully middlebrow -- well-done and entertaining but just a tad safe. It's a pity, because their best films -- Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993), and this one -- set a high standard, despite their "safeness." Few films have a better sense of place and time than A Room With a View, in its depiction of Florence at the start of the 20th century. Granted, it leans a bit too heavily on the cliché about stuffy Brits losing their cool in the warmer climate of Tuscany, but that's the fault of E.M. Forster's novel -- not one of his major works -- and not of Jhabvala's Oscar-winning screenplay. Oscars also went to the art direction team and to costumers Jenny Beavan and John Bright, and it was nominated for best picture, for the supporting performances of Denholm Elliott and Maggie Smith, for Ivory's direction, and for Tony Pierce-Roberts's cinematography. The cast includes Helena Bonham Carter (in her "corset-roles" period) and Julian Sands, along with a then little-known Daniel Day-Lewis. Proof that Day-Lewis is one of the greatest actors of all time is no longer needed, but it's worth contemplating that he created the character of the prissy Cecil Vyse in this film within a year of appearing as the gay street punk Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears), and that he would follow with the sexy Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman, 1988), the paralyzed Christy Brown in My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989), and the dashing Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992). Day-Lewis's Cecil Vyse verges on a caricature of the sexually repressed Brit, but he has an affecting moment near the end when, after Lucy (Bonham Carter) breaks off their engagement, he emerges as a vulnerable, three-dimensional character. Richard Robbins's fine score is memorably supplemented by Kiri Te Kanawa's recordings of two Puccini arias: "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi and "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" from La Rondine.