Hollywood’s award-season prognosticators are busy divining the Oscar chances of prestige pictures like Christopher Nolan’s summer box office hit Dunkirk against festival darlings such as Guillermo del Toro’s Venice-winning aquatic interspecies love story The Shape of Water and unseen 800-pound gorillas like Steven Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers exposé The Post. Yet one movie has been quietly but consistently building a steady drumbeat of support: Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name.
This swooning romance between 24-year-old grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and precocious 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) during a hot Italian summer in 1983 won’t open in theaters until November 24, but it first unspooled way back at the Sundance Film Festival last January. And what a debut: festival director John Cooper, who introduced the film at its world premiere, actually started to cry just trying to describe it.
