“Precious youth is short-lived as a dream,” wrote Mimnermus, six centuries before the birth of Christ, and he certainly wasn’t the first Greek poet to romanticize adolescence. Thousands of years later, artists have so thoroughly weighed down the teenage experience with wistful generalizations that it’s nearly impossible to tell stories about it without resorting to cliché.
Although it is deliriously romantic, the Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s new film Call Me By Your Name is too deeply immersed in the subjective experience of a singular 17-year-old, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), to rehash conventional wisdom about youth. The movie spends so much time lingering on sensory details, from the taste of freshly picked fruit to the touch of a lover’s hand to the urgency of its dreamy, eclectic soundtrack, that it practically transport us into his skin. Set in Italy during the hottest months of 1983 and adapted from a novel of the same name by André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name tracks Elio’s affair with his first male lover, Oliver (Armie Hammer), from infatuation to consummation to their inevitable parting. A handsome doctoral student who radiates confidence, Oliver comes to live and work with Elio’s archeologist father (Michael Stuhlbarg) for the summer. For an introspective teenager who’s never truly been in love, and whose hobbies include playing and transcribing classical music, falling for this Adonis in a button-down shirt is like discovering a new language to communicate with the outside world.
What’s implicit in his story may be the only genuinely universal truth about adolescence—that it’s a time of blurred borders, when the innocence of childhood starts to chafe like shoes you’ve outgrown, but adult obligations still sound deadening. Identity is at its least stable in these years, when the books and bands you love become your mirror and it only takes a kiss to collapse your unformed self into someone else. The movie gets its title from a scene where Elio and Oliver literally exchange names, as though to annihilate any boundary between them. Its soundtrack translates that electricity, of worlds colliding, into music.
The soundtrack unites Elio’s internal life, with its piano compositions and sheet music, and the ’80s pop hits that represent the external reality he accesses through Oliver. Watching the film for the first time, a viewer lost in cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s overripe visuals might mistake the piano-driven instrumentals for a score crafted by a single composer. In fact, Guadagnino’s journey into his hero’s psyche is accompanied by works that span continents and centuries.
Like Elio—an American Jew living in Italy, who also speaks French with his sometime girlfriend (Esther Garrel)—this soundtrack has an international sensibility and an old soul. Canonical compositions segue into tracks by contemporary innovators like Ryuichi Sakamoto and John Adams. The Canadian pianist André Laplante, as well as the British and Hungarian duo of Valéria Szervánszky and Ronald Cavaye, perform pieces by Ravel. In one scene, Elio plays the gentle “Zion hört die Wächter singen,” from Bach’s chorale cantata “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” three times in a row for a mesmerized Oliver, tweaking each performance to simulate how a different famous composer might put his stamp on it. (The soundtrack features Italian pianist Alessio Bax’s delicate recording of the movement.)
Because their relationship is supposed to be a secret, the couple’s dialogue is often coded. There are secret messages in the music, too. “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” steals phrases from the Bible’s sensual Song of Songs. One of Sakamoto’s two contributions, the dreamy and then halting “Germination,” comes from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a strange Nagisa Ôshima film where the composer stars as a Japanese soldier in World War II who develops a homoerotic fixation on a prisoner played by David Bowie.
Eighties pop singles are scattered amid the classical pieces on a tracklist that looks haphazard but actually represents a thoughtful convergence of sensibilities—one that coheres even without the accompanying images. Most of the songs that blast from speakers at the bars and dance parties Elio and Oliver frequent are cultural hybrids. France’s Bandolero add Spanish phrases, maracas, rap verses, and a dash of English to their appreciation of one Miss Cha Cha Cha on the bouncy “Paris Latino.” Loredana Bertè, an Italian singer who’s known for her eclecticism, brings a throaty nightclub voice, a French catchphrase, and Gallic accordion sounds to her synth-pop gem “J’adore Venise.” You may remember Giorgio Moroder and Joe Esposito’s silky ballad “Lady, Lady, Lady” from Flashdance, which became a teen box-office hit in the spring of 1983. Here, though, lyrics like, “Dancing behind masks, just subtle pantomime/But images reveal whatever lonely hearts can hide,” sound as though they were written just for Elio and Oliver.
It’s Sufjan Stevens’ contributions—two new compositions, plus a remix of his Age of Adz track “Futile Devices”—that bring the soundtrack into a wiser, sadder present. Guadagnino has said the songs are meant to serve a similar purpose to voiceover narration in the typical literary adaptation. “We wanted [music] that wasn’t as close to us in first person,” he told an interviewer, explaining that he thought of Stevens because his lyrical indie-folk sounds poignant and elusive at once. His whispery voice first appears midway through the film, when “Futile Devices” plays soon after Elio and Oliver have acknowledged their mutual attraction. It’s a moment of reverie, set to a song that revels in closeup images of a relationship that transcends words. The remix elegantly translates the original’s rippling guitar into Elio’s emotional language: somber piano.
Guadagnino only asked Stevens for one song, but he wrote two, and including both is the sole misstep here. “Visions of Gideon,” which plays in the film’s final moments, is stunning. Over twinkling piano and dulled percussion, Stevens nails the surreal experience of reminiscing about an old love: “Is it a video?” he keeps repeating. But “Mystery of Love,” from a happier era of Elio and Oliver’s affair, comes across as twee onscreen and on the album. The rhymes are too neat, the phrasing (“Blessed be the mystery of love”) is too precious, a reference to Alexander the Great’s male lover Hephaestion feels pandering, and Stevens’ coo is so honeyed, it’s cloying.
The film’s most recognizable sync, Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” doesn’t just make for a delightful Armie Hammer meme. It’s also a better anthem for this romance—and a more inspired fusion of Elio’s internal and external worlds—than “Mystery of Love.” While the marimba melody burbles like a piano gone giddy, the lyrics sell a vision of love far more iconoclastic than the one in the first movie it soundtracked: Valley Girl. You probably don’t need Call Me By Your Name to introduce you to the song, but once you’ve seen how it liberates Elio, you may never want to hear it outside the context of this deftly constructed soundtrack.
