Script Analysis: Call Me By Your Name

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Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, adapted from the novel by Andre Aciman, has a distinctly literary quality. And yet despite the complexity of the movie’s stark images and atmospheric montages, it is built on a simple story structure: a love story told in three acts.

From this base tale, so hardwired into the modern filmgoer’s subconscious that we recognize its beats without effort, Guadagnino and his screenwriter James Ivory can elaborate; they fill the sight and sound of the film with multilingualism, musical observation, and classical literature. A simple story, told and textured with a flourish.

Our close reading of the script will focus on story elements whose beauty has typically been attributed to the genius of the director. In most cases we’ll show that the screenwriter had a fair hand in this too. (A good screenplay can simplify the task of any director – proving this with concrete examples has become our aim of late). We’ll also touch on moments of diversion between authorial intention and directorial outcome. Below, we’ll study specific moments of dialogue and scene description from James Ivory’s script, focussing on the techniques which created a show-don’t-tell film that is tangible, sensitive, and beautiful.

The Set-up:

Not an inch of pagespace is wasted before the introduction of this story’s disrupting force, Oliver. The opening scene description – the script’s very first sentence – introduces the sound of his car. Here, there’s no effort made to establish the status quo of life at the Perlman’s villa; we simply dive right in. And how’s this for economy of expression – only one noun is used to introduce the story function of Armie Hammer’s American scholar in the film: ‘L’usurpateur’ (‘The usurper’).

Structurally, James Ivory is forcing us right into the action and leaving the Perlman’s life-as-usual in the unexpressed space before the script’s opening. As such, we have a contender for the earliest meet-cute moment in 2010s art cinema: at the bottom of page 1.

Amorous Animosity:

As in so many stories of passion, eventual romantic compatibility is signalled in the early stages of the screenplay through tension, bickering and childishness. Initially, Elio treats his ‘usurper’ coldly. After all, this man threatens to divert parental attention away from only child Elio, and later refers to himself as a ‘son-in-law’ of the family.

Following some frosty encounters, Prof. Perlman encourages Elio to let down his guard:

As viewers, we all know which of these two predictions is most likely to serve the story.

Flashes of sensuality are planted from the onset of the screenplay, building to fleshy crescendos only in the second half. Moments of physical connection feel laden with intent in the script, although Guadagnino presents them with such subtlety in the film that they may be considered incidental, or overlooked entirely. Take this bicycle beat, for instance:

And its intensification – a casual massage that Oliver gives Elio:

Although we may not pick up on the significance of these moments on first watch, a seasoned reader/writer knows that nothing enters a script by coincidence. Constructing the physical sensibility of this script – its electric touch – is a task that starts on the page.

Elio’s growing love for Oliver is communicated in ways that can be difficult to interpret (mediated through a German translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, anyone?). James Ivory is happy to let these emotions bubble in the subtext of the screenplay, until one vintage moment of transposed dialogue:

Could any line scream ‘I love you, Oliver’ more clearly? We can almost picture the parenthetical above the line that contradicts its meaning. This isn’t emotional sublimation so much as an embarrassed, choked confession.

The Coming-of-age Arc:

Romantic plot-threads are frequently paired with coming-of-age narratives. This partnering allows the romance to unlock the doors to adulthood for a protagonist, effectively raising its stakes within a script. Elio’s journey of homosexual discovery is, naturally, a journey of self-discovery. This is a point that’s neatly developed in the text of the script, and the subtext of the film:

Later, as Elio approaches manhood, we see him confront his own developing masculinity in the shaving mirror. It’s something of a self-discovery set-piece, but nonetheless works well on the screen:

Later, Ivory and Guadagnino once again lean on classical texts for a thematic musing that isn’t directly connected to Elio’s personal development, but is also pulled above the subtextual level:

An American in Europe:

One character arc that flies under the radar in the film is the experience of Oliver as an American in Europe. His progression is one of insecurity to familiarity, although his outsider status (and he hardly looks Italian) does condition his confidence and behaviour later in the script. The first beat hinting at Oliver’s status anxiety comes as a counter-point to Elio’s insecurity of self-knowledge, at the very same breakfast:

This moment also plants a question about Oliver’s upbringing (who omitted to teach him this kind of thing as a child?), a beat that is paid off in the final act of the film when Oliver confesses that his father  would have ‘carted [him] off to a correctional facility’ if he’d known that his son was gay.

In the period of courtship, Elio needles Oliver by referring to him as ‘americano’. The term is never used in anger, although we sense that Elio is trying to pull status on his mostly monoglot partner by reminding him that he’s a fish-out-of-water. Later in the film, Annella’s snobbishness regarding Oliver’s nationality suggests that this haughtiness is heritable:  

The irony here, of course, is that they are inherently patronizing and excluding Oliver by speaking at a pace which he cannot follow in a language he can barely understand. On the whole, the arc for Oliver as an insider/outsider is not clearly delineated in the film. At times, for instance when he settles down to cards with the regulars at Crema’s bar, he seems like a regular Jep Gambardella; at others, he’s making a fool of himself and his poor Italian in a Bergamo piazza, or being called out for his priggishness by a spiky Elio. It’s an interesting story element to keep track off when re-watching.

The Question of Abuse:

Only a minority of critical responses to the film grapple with the issue of abuse. Tonally, Guadagnino seems eager to sanitize the shades of abusiveness which Ivory has painted onto his script. Clear moments of discomfort (as we’ll see below) are left underemphasized; contrastingly, the highs of the relationship are intensified and scored with joyous melodies (the sequence at the Bergamo waterfall, soundtracked by Sufjan Stevens’s Mystery of Love, for example).

It’s hard to say whether the whitewashing of the screenplay’s more predatory beats was the intention of the director, or simply the result of subtle visual storytelling technique and naturalistic performances. Perhaps Guadagnino suggests that every lover is undergoing a kind of abuse. In any case, the outcome is an aestheticized rendering of moments that in the screenplay seem uncomfortable and coercive, particularly in the context of a sexual relationship between a 17-year-old boy and an otherwise-straight man 15 years his senior.

Take a look, for example, at Oliver ‘making up Elio’s mind for him’ in the scene below:

Or perhaps this beat, in which Oliver seems oblivious to (or wilfully ignorant of) Elio’s awkwardness:

This atmosphere of abuse is even called by its name – in keeping with the theme of the title – moments before Oliver removes Elio’s trunks to perform oral sex on him:

Why do the characters choose sickness as a metaphor here? Has Elio truly convinced himself that homosexuality is a disease? (It seems unlikely given the liberal attitude of his parents.) And why does Oliver riff on the theme of sickness, confirming Elio’s self-doubt and even challenging himself to go one step further? Stripped from its visual context, this scene is extremely disquieting. Is the director cheating the screenwriter out of the more sinister moments of writing? And, most pressingly, have we closed our eyes to this?

Conclusion:

Perhaps Ivory’s guide on whether to interpret the film as romance or abuse is to be found in Prof. Perlman’s fatherly speech to his son in the final act of the film. Here, the academic glorifies his son’s relationship with his own research assistant, and wishes he had experienced something similar. But he’s an outsider with no way of understanding the emotional dynamic. And there’s such arrogance to his speech: ‘In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, to pray that their sons land on their feet. But I am not such a parent.’ Are we asked to side with Perlman? To excuse the relationship as a beautiful unicum – one of his aestheticized classical affairs? The direction of the scene, and of the film leading up to this point, suggests that we are; there’s an earnestness of meaning implied by composition and performance. It feels maddening.

The novel, screenplay and finished film of Call Me by Your Name share some beauties, but also obscure many subtleties that should have been inherited from the preceding form of the story. If anything, the exercise of reading the screenplay whilst watching the completed film has opened our eyes to the enormous volume of subtext that is lost on the journey from script to screen, and on the other hand how much is gained in other areas. As screenwriters, we should learn to accept these changes, or forever face disappointment in the execution of our material; but discount the screenwriter at your peril.