Call Me By Your Name: How to Bungle Perspective

 
Call Me By Your Name is a rather silly title for a movie or even a silly thing to say. Why would anyone want their romantic interest to call them by their name? That is a stranger impulse than asking your romantic interest to call you by the name of their pet goldfish or snail. Of course, such impulse would make complete sense to people who are so mentally unstable that they don't even have a coherent sense of self; they can't distinguish between their own hands and others' or between their own names and others'. In other words, people who hopelessly lack a coherent point of view. And it so turns out that this flick is rather aptly titled. Because Luca Guadagnino has the hardest time distinguishing the points of view of the two protagonists.

Point of view is everything. Richard Linklater always knows whose point of view each shot is. And so as the audience, we fully experience what both Jesse and Celine are feeling in each scene in the Before trilogy. Conversely, if a director doesn't even know whose point of view a beat let alone a shot is, then the movie suffers. There is one pivotal scene where the director completely butchers POVs in Call Me By Your Name in stark contrast to what Todd Haynes does in Carol. (The two films are thematically similar enough in that it's a love story between two people of the same sex and thus carries an additional layer of vulnerability: even before you get to ask, "do they feel the same way?" you first have to ask, "do they lean the same way?" But that's where the similarity ends. One is vastly superior to the other in directing, writing, editing, acting, and music.)

Scene: Is this your orchard?

This pivotal scene starts with Oliver coming down from his room to join Elio's family for lunch. This is where the film amps up Elio's curiosity in Oliver; the audience is shown a close up of Elio's gaze at Oliver for the first time. In other words, this is the scene where the audience should be, through Elio's eyes, crossing the line from curiosity to possible attraction. The director's job, of course, then becomes guiding the audience through the scene from Elio's point of view. Unfortunately, that's not what Luca Guadagnino does. The vast majority of the scene is shot from Oliver's perspective save for fleeting close ups of Elio gazing at Oliver. The result is that Elio's stirring gaze at Oliver falls flat and strikes as artificial and forced. 

It's not necessarily a problem that the scene starts with Oliver coming down the stairs and looking around the house as he finds his way to the table. The problem is the scene begins with a subjective point of view (Oliver's) and never makes an effort to organically shift the point of view from Oliver's to Elio's. Still 1 isn't subjective. But Still 2 and 3 make everything that follows Oliver's subjective point of view. 

Still 1

Still 2

Still 3

Barring some narrative structure or character dynamic, close ups that are not preceded by another character's subjective POV almost always orient the audience to the subjective POV of the character under the close up. And when that close up is from a low angle, much more so. (Low angle shots can feel very personal and as a result are often used by auteurs to play up a character's vulnerability. Example & Example 2) Put another way, Still 3 is a double whammy for priming the audience to take in the upcoming shots from Elio's point of view. 

After looking around the house a bit, Oliver finds the family and takes a seat. How this moment is shot is so crucial because Elio will now be in the frame as well. If the shot of Oliver arriving and sitting down isn't established from Elio's POV, Guadagnino has to find some opening in the script (either a subtext-loaded line or a pregnant pause) where he can orient the audience to Elio's POV by changing up the shot. So let's look at what Guadagnino does. After showing Oliver walk towards the table without Elio in the frame, Guadagnino pans right to show Elio sitting at the far side of the table. 

Still 4

Still 5

Still 4 and 5 on their own draw our attention to Elio. But a film is a sequence of images with sound over it. No shot stands on its own as a silent image. The audience gives meaning to each shot based on the shots that preceded it and on who's talking to who. The previous shots had been established as Oliver's subjective POV. And with Oliver having the most lines and primarily conversing with Elio's parents, we don't recognize Elio as the emotional center of the shot. Oliver is. 

It doesn't help that Oliver is seated the closest to the camera (the audience) and Elio is seated the farthest. It also doesn't help that Oliver is the leftmost character in the frame. 

In short, while the composition does give most of its weight to Elio in the shot, the weight isn't heavy enough to override the dialogue and the lead up to the shot that establish Oliver as the shot's protagonist. Guadagnino should have given an even heavier weight to Elio in the composition to establish Elio as the shot's protagonist. For example, Guadagnino could have shot the scene during the time of the day when only Elio would have been in the sun. 

(As an aside, Hitchcock famously remarked that a shot of a man smiling is rather absent of meaning on its own. If we see a man looking at something, a woman nursing a baby, and then the man smiling, it's a humane and perhaps paternal smile. But if we see a man looking at something, a girl in a bikini, and then the man smiling, it's a rather lewd one. Link to the remark around 4:30)

Anyway, Guadagnino has painted himself (or rather shot himself) into a corner. He somehow has to re-establish the scene from Elio's POV. And he makes two big clumsy attempts at that because there are no lines or pauses in the dialogue that allow for an organic shift in POV. 

His first attempt is when he cuts to a close up of Elio gazing at Oliver when Oliver asks Elio's parents, "Is this your orchard?" Because the question is rather impersonal and not directed at Elio, the cut to a close up comes off as extremely forced and unnatural. Each cut in a film has to be motivated by what's happening between and inside the characters. Nothing in Oliver's impersonal question directed at Elio's parents changes the dynamic between Elio and Oliver. And it certainly shouldn't stir up whatever set of emotions Elio is feeling towards Oliver.

We can look at Todd Haynes' Carol for an example of cuts that mirror changes in what's happening between and inside the characters. In the impeccably shot and acted lunch scene (shot from Therese's POV), the camera gets more intimate with Carol as Carol opens up more to Therese and the camera gets more intimate with Therese as Therese becomes more intrigued by and drawn to Carol. Haynes start the scene with both Carol and Therese a little distant (Still 6 & 7). 

Still 6 (Carol is rather distant)

Still 7 (Therese isn't fully drawn in yet)

But after Carol implies to Therese that she much prefers the company of a woman to that of a man, the camera gets much more intimate with the characters (Still 8 & 9). More intimate with Carol because she has just opened up a bit to Therese (us) and more intimate with Therese because Therese is (and subsequently, we are) more invested in the conversation. Still 8 is right during Carol's innuendo, and Still 9 is right after Therese responds to the innuendo by saying, "Your perfume... it's nice." (Technically, there's a middle step where the camera gets subtly more intimate with the characters after they exchange names. But the point still stands.)

Still 8

Still 9: "Your perfume... it's nice."

In short, the camera's intimacy with a character perfectly mirrors how intimate a character feels to our POV character or how intimate our POV character feels toward the object of her desire. None of this is happening in the lunch scene in Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name. (Would hearing your romantic interest ask your parents, "Is this your orchard?" stir up your desire for them? Probably not. But an innuendo on why they decided to have lunch with you probably would.)

After the forced close up of Elio gazing at Oliver, Guadagnino almost succeeds in establishing the wide shot (of the family and Oliver at the table) from Elio's POV. That is, after a close up of Elio gazing at Oliver, Guadagnino cuts to an over-the-shoulder shot of Elio looking at Oliver (Still 10). 

Still 10

But instead of lingering on this shot so that the audience starts identifying with Elio and sharing in his nascent desire for Oliver, Guadagnino cuts to a wide shot rather quickly. And also at the worst time: just as when Elio's mother starts answering Oliver's impersonal orchard question. If Guadagnino had cut to the wide shot when there was silence, the audience's stronger identification with Elio would have stayed after the cut. But because Guadagnino cuts just as the mother answers Oliver's question, the audience's identification with Elio breaks; the audience looks at the mother after the cut to the wide shot since she's speaking and then looks at Oliver since it was Oliver's question she answered. The second the audience looks at Elio's mother in the wide shot is the second their identification with Elio is severed. 

Guadagnino's second attempt to have the audience feel Elio's nascent desire for Oliver falls flat as well. It happens in the middle of Oliver saying "I know myself too well." It's a subtext-loaded line (i.e. Oliver is already attracted to Elio and he doesn't want to start anything because it'll have to end when the summer is over). But from Elio's own perspective, it's a pretty trivial statement. And it's Elio's perspective that Guadagnino should be selling in this scene. In other words, the cut is motivated by the director's understanding of the line's subtext instead of Elio's reaction to the line. So the cut to a close up again feels forced and untruthful. 

What I think really happened with this scene is that Guadagnino didn't realize he had unwittingly established the scene from Oliver's POV. Because the composition does have Elio as the shot's protagonist, Guadagnino could have found it natural to cut to a close up of Elio, believing he was cutting from an objective shot with Elio as the emotional center to a subjective shot of Elio. But that still wouldn't exonerate Gaudagnino very much; he chose some pretty terrible moments to make those cuts. To be fair to Guadagnino, there weren't really any moments that called for such cuts. But then again, it was his job as the director to either rewrite the script to put in the moments where cuts would have been natural or just set up the shot differently from the beginning so that he wouldn't have to make such drastic and awkward shifts in perspective. 

Luca Guadagnino is certainly more talented than most directors who don't even think about perspectives. And he's lightyears ahead of Rian "I-singled-handedly-ruined-Star-Wars" Johnson. But unfortunately, while Guadagnino does think about points of view, he also jumbles them in a film that is supposedly a shining example of avant-garde filmmaking.