Call Me by Your Name / André Aciman

James Ivory makes beautiful films from beautiful books, so after seeing the Oscar-nominated movie, Call Me by Your Name, I was intrigued. Would the sumptuous Italian setting get an E.M. Forster treatment like Room with a View? Were the characters as complex as those in The Remains of the Day? Was the social commentary as sharp as in Howard’s End?

Well, the novel Call Me by Your Name is basically a love story with plenty of young angst. If it’s an ode to Italy you’re looking for (which I think I was), it really isn’t that. There are many differences between the book and the movie, and as often is the case, many scenes from the book don’t make the cut, and an interesting character in the book is not in the movie at all. In fact, the seaside town in the book becomes a landlocked village in Lombardy in the cinematic version. The trip at the end of the summer is to Rome in the book and not Bergamo as in the movie. Some of the 1980s nostalgic music and dance from the film is not there and the group social scenes are done quite differently. I also found that the book seemed to have trouble coming to an end, much like a Beethoven symphony with little codas that serve as epilogues to epilogues.

The movie took liberties with the script, but in the end it think it may have been the better for it.

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