Watch: 'Call Me By Your Name' and 'A Bigger Splash'

Films

Oh gosh! I can't believe we haven't recommended 'Call Me By Your Name' here before. It's honestly my favorite film to come out in the past two decades, and has instilled a love for Director Luca Guadagnino's portfolio of works. The way he captures a destination and a setting is simply entrancing.

Debuted in 2017, 'Call Me By Your Name' was Timotheé Chalamet's first stand-out hit, and paired with the now questionable Armie Hammer, it is a coming of age love story set in the summer of 1983 in an Italian villa on the outskirts of Bergamo. It's dreamy, languid, and I am dazzled with the thoughts of picking apricots in a garden, splashing in a small fountain, and dancing beside upbeat classical keys. For me, it is the ultimate hideaway, the European summer that I always want to live.

The New Yorker wrote a fabulous review of the movie when it came out, calling it "an Erotic Triumph" if you can't get past the cringey sexual scenes. Beyond that, it describes my thoughts exactly:

The new film by Luca Guadagnino begins in the summer of 1983, in a place so enchanted, with its bright green gardens, that it belongs in a fairy tale. The location, the opening credits tell us, is “Somewhere in Northern Italy.” Such vagueness is deliberate: the point of a paradise is that it could exist anywhere but that, once you reach the place, it brims with details so precise in their intensity that you never forget them.

[He] showed his mastery of Italian settings and of same-sex romance.... The rhythm, would have been more languorous, as if the weather had seeped into people’s lazy bones...[He kept] cutting short the transports of delight; the lovers pedal away from us, on bikes, to the lovely strains of Ravel’s “Mother Goose Suite,” only for the scene to hit the brakes. 'Call Me by Your Name' is suffused with heat, and piled high with fine food, but it isn’t a nice movie; you see it not to unwind but to be wound up—to be unrelaxed by the force with which rapture strikes. There is even a gratifying cameo by a peach, which proves useful in an erotic emergency, and merits an Academy Award for Best Supporting Fruit.

Desire is passed around the movie like a dish, and the characters are invited to help themselves, each to his or her own taste.

The final scene, which for the impatient might be a bore, focuses on Chalamet's fire-lit face for over 5 minutes, and allows the viewer to brood on the intense father-son chat that just occurred, crowning it one of the most moving that I can think of in modern movie history. I can watch this film over and over again and never get bored, but rather be intoxicated by summery life in an Italian villa.

And, if you're so intrigued, Guadadnino's earlier film 'A Bigger Splash,' stars Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes who grace another dazzling villa off an island in Southern Italy.... Both films are mastery in European visual romance.

Watch it: on Hulu, Amazon, and Paramount+ (and watch 'A Bigger Splash' on Amazon)

Photo Source: Architectural Digest, the New York Times, Vox, Offscreen

Syllogi’s ‘Musings’ is a series helping you paint a picture of a destination while traveling from your living room. From relevant books and articles, inspiring movies and tv shows, to songs and even treats and dishes, our goal is to curate a sensory experience that will prepare you for an upcoming trip, reminiscence on adventures past, or simply to envision a place that exists in your bucket list fantasies.