Never Be Bored
12 December 2018
Is it better to speak or die?
Call Me By Your Name, book by André Aciman, 2017 Luca Guadagnino film. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Carol, 2015 Todd Haynes film, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne's 1995 staging.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to feature the book or the movie as the main recommendation of this post, but then I thought, what the hell, it's my blog, why not both. I went to see Call Me By Your Name in theaters on a whim when it first came out, knew nothing about it going in, had only watched the trailer in the half hour before heading to the theater. I adored it. Every frame of this movie looks like a vintage photograph. Elio and Oliver have such lovely chemistry together, as professor's son and graduate student respectively falling in love in 1980s Italy. It's just beautiful. The soundtrack is great too, Sufjan Stevens wrote "Mystery of Love" and "Vision of Gideon" just for it and both are gorgeous.
After watching the film, I was curious how much it followed the book. Having read it, I'm honestly not sure which I prefer. The book is a bit darker, you get much more of the sense of the scope of Elio's, frankly, obsession with Oliver. It's practically stream of consciousness at times, almost poetic. The plot is mostly the same, with many lines from the movie coming straight from the book, but whichever you read/see first, I think you'd still love the other.
Another shy, dark haired boy pining after the perfect golden boy: The Song of Achilles retells the Iliad with Patroclus and Achilles as the center focus. It's a love story, it's a war story, it's a coming of age story, it's an old, old story. Like Call Me By Your Name, it features two characters who are closer than close, who understand each other like no one else could. "Cor cordium," says Oliver, heart of hearts. "Philtatos," says Achilles, most beloved. "I recognized him by the inflection of his footfalls up the stairway to our balcony," says Elio; "I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth," says Patroclus.
Yet another quiet, brunette character and an older larger than life blonde—but this time, they're both women! If you liked the queer retro vibe of Call Me By Your Name, then you might like Carol too, currently streaming on Netflix. It's as cinematically beautiful as Call Me By Your Name, but a bit more grown up, higher stakes, not a summer in Italy but a winter in New York.
If you appreciated all the classical music in Call Me By Your Name, then you might like Swan Lake, my favorite of Tchaikovsky's ballets. And while the choreography of Petipa is most well known, try Matthew Bourne's 1995 staging, famous for casting an all male corp of swans. It's practically a psychological thriller in a ballet—the queen can't show her affection for her son, a mysterious but familiar stranger appears at a ball, swans appear in the prince's bedroom. I think the intense, tortuous sense of wanting matches some of Elio's inner monologue from the book. Clips are around YouTube, or you can look into getting recordings of the full production (I think I like the version with Adam Cooper as the lead swan best).