The only dark clouds looming on Elio’s horizon are unrequited love and the lover’s departure not small pains, to be sure, but surely lesser ones. In the other movies referenced above, homosexual desire is the catalyst for two murders, several unhappy (heterosexual) marriages, a custody battle, and the threat of a public scandal. He doesn’t wonder if he will get HIV (or any other STD), nor does he conceive of his relationship with Oliver as something that might put him in the crosshairs of the law, or cast him out beyond the comforts of family, faith, and community. Elio wonders if his affection is reciprocated, is a bit unsure about the mechanics of sex, and is crushed when circumstances eventually drive this star-crossed pair apart. When a teenage Elio falls for a visiting graduate student, Oliver, he experiences a reckoning with sexual desire, identity, and the bittersweet nature of a first love in the way that I imagine is familiar to most straight people, judging from its frequent portrayal in popular books and movies.
What was unique about Call Me by Your Name, in the annals of both mainstream gay literature and film, was its departure from the tragedy and anxiety of discovery that saturate most queer narratives. For Aciman, who published three other novels in the decade before his big-screen adaptation, the movie launched him into the mainstream literary stratosphere.
The film turbo-charged the careers of actors Timothée Chalamet, who first emerged in a breakout role earlier that year in Lady Bird, and Armie Hammer, who had perennially been pushed as the next “It” man by the industry with little success. What makes the success of Call Me by Your Name notable among this list of films is that it drove sales almost entirely on the strength and promise of its central gay coming-of-age romance with little in the way of politically thematic tie-in ( Milk) or bankable A-List star-power ( Brokeback Mountain and Carol). While that number pales in comparison to the global box office for Brokeback Mountain (2005, $178 million), it falls roughly between two other mainstream queer films you may remember: Milk (2008, $55 million) and Carol (2015, $43 million). MOST PEOPLE PROBABLY hadn’t heard the name André Aciman before 2017, when the adaptation of his 2007 novel, Call Me by Your Name, became a sensation, raking in nearly $42 million in global box office sales and garnering four Academy Award nominations.
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