A Review of Call Me by Your Name, Courtesy of Philology 101

Abstract

A Review of Call Me by Your Name, Courtesy of Philology 101 JUSTIN HUDAK The title of Luca Guadagnino’s latest film derives from the first half of the climactic line whispered in bed by a 24-year-old Classics graduate student named Oliver (played by Armie Hammer) to his professor’s 17-year-old son, Elio Perlman (played by Timothée Chalamet). Conjoined to the titular phrase “Call me by your name” is a promise: “and I’ll call you by mine.” Reviewers have said next to nothing about these eleven monosyllables, about this pair of five-word phrases made up of 16 letters apiece, balanced upon the fulcrum of an unassuming conjunction, and uttered at the midpoint of a drama about that greatest and most mysterious conjunction that we call love. But these words both require and repay our close attention. The idea of reciprocity is perfectly easy to understand (“Call me . . . and I’ll call you”). Less readily apparent, however, is the aptness of the rhetorical figure in which this idea is couched: “me by your . . . you by mine” constitutes a chiasmus. It is not the film’s first such figure, for the two lovers are introduced by an interlocking of words which, though formulaic, is nevertheless wonderfully prophetic of the embrace that will come later: “Elio, Oliver; Oliver, Elio,” says Professor Perlman (played by Michael Stuhlbarg). Oliver is already, at this early stage, inside Elio; at the same time, E-L-I-O is already, anagrammatically, inside O-L-I-v-E-r. More complicated is the chiasmus contained within Oliver’s hendecasyllable: syntactically speaking, it casts each lover in the dual role of posLuca Guadagnino, director, Call Me By Your Name. P. Spears and H. Rosenman, producers (United States: Sony Pictures Classics, 2017). Based on the novel by André Aciman. arion 26.2 fall 2018 sessing subject (“your,” “mine”) and object possessed (“me,” “you”). Of course, for the characters themselves the pleasure of this much-delayed climax is more tactile than syntactic. Only when the film’s titular line is uttered do the interlocutors lock limbs and consummate their hitherto platonic relationship . If such complexities seem more appropriate to literature than to film, perhaps that is because they are in this case. Like its title, Guadagnino’s film is itself but part of a larger whole, the cinematic response to a literary call made a decade earlier by André Aciman’s novel of the same name. But the book and the movie are not the only things that share a name: so, too, do the characters whose love they chronicle. How so? To invoke another of Oliver’s lines, “I’m going to talk etymology, so just bear with me a second.” The name “Oliver” derives from the Latin oliva (olive tree), while the name “Elio” bears an uncanny resemblance to this Latin word’s ancient Greek counterpart elaia, which via itacism becomes the modern Greek elia. We would perhaps be justified in regarding this correspondence as a mere coincidence, were it not for Oliver’s own keen interest in etymology. In a scene from the movie based very closely upon an episode in Aciman’s novel, Oliver expounds thus upon the history of the word “apricot”: [M]ost Latin words do find their origins in Greek words. However, in the case of “apricot” it’s a little bit more of a complicated journey. . . . Here, the Greek actually takes over from the Latin, the Latin word being praecoquum or praecoquere, so “to precook” or “pre-ripen,” as you know, “to be precocious or premature.” And the Byzantines, to go on, then borrowed praecox, which became prekokkia, which then became berikokki, which is how the Arabs got al-birquq. This bravura performance elicits awed silence, which the young scholar breaks with the casual remark, “Courtesy of Philology 101.” Disregarding the fact that most Latin words do not find their origins in Greek words (a myth we can only hope was dispelled in Philology 102), we would do well to consider how this claim relates to the lovers: the precocious 152 a review of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME Elio (whose name is rooted in Greek) actually...