*****This review may contain spoilers!!!!*****
I have just finished reading the book. It is deeply moving. I am still in a daze. Heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time. The film adaptation is erotic, cinematic, well acted, and painfully beautiful, as Luca Guadagnino's other film, I Am Love (starring the luminous Tilda Swinton).
What makes the theme universal? To my eyes, it has to do with the complex issue of love and loss. The film and the book deal with love/loss not in the simple sense of losing the person we love, but in the sense of deliberately losing the person we love so we can sustain loving and desiring the person. "I can't love you unless I give you up" could be the line (not from the book or film) that captures the relation between Elio and Oliver.
Both Elio and Oliver maintain the minimal distance between them instead of fully committing to their desire 'til the end. Which makes their love the sad kind. As Elio said, "Time makes us sentimental." The right time never arrives for Elio and Oliver. They relate to each other from the lenses of the past ("pluperfect" love, to borrow Elio's wording) and the future. It is never now. The thematic is appealing because it speaks to many of us who have loved and continue to love on the basis of the fundamental loss at the heart of desire. Is there a way out of this spiral? Is there another way of approaching love? These are questions the book and the movie leave the reader/viewer to answer. The ending is unhappy yet "satisfying", precisely because this satisfaction involves a mix of hope and agony. It keeps the movement of desire in motion, for both Elio and Oliver, and for the reader/viewer.
PS: I can't help but reflect on this great film vis-à-vis Guadagnino's another great film, I Am Love, where the two protagonists literally leave their respective worlds behind to be in a world that they both share.
I have just finished reading the book. It is deeply moving. I am still in a daze. Heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time. The film adaptation is erotic, cinematic, well acted, and painfully beautiful, as Luca Guadagnino's other film, I Am Love (starring the luminous Tilda Swinton).
What makes the theme universal? To my eyes, it has to do with the complex issue of love and loss. The film and the book deal with love/loss not in the simple sense of losing the person we love, but in the sense of deliberately losing the person we love so we can sustain loving and desiring the person. "I can't love you unless I give you up" could be the line (not from the book or film) that captures the relation between Elio and Oliver.
Both Elio and Oliver maintain the minimal distance between them instead of fully committing to their desire 'til the end. Which makes their love the sad kind. As Elio said, "Time makes us sentimental." The right time never arrives for Elio and Oliver. They relate to each other from the lenses of the past ("pluperfect" love, to borrow Elio's wording) and the future. It is never now. The thematic is appealing because it speaks to many of us who have loved and continue to love on the basis of the fundamental loss at the heart of desire. Is there a way out of this spiral? Is there another way of approaching love? These are questions the book and the movie leave the reader/viewer to answer. The ending is unhappy yet "satisfying", precisely because this satisfaction involves a mix of hope and agony. It keeps the movement of desire in motion, for both Elio and Oliver, and for the reader/viewer.
PS: I can't help but reflect on this great film vis-à-vis Guadagnino's another great film, I Am Love, where the two protagonists literally leave their respective worlds behind to be in a world that they both share.