There was a time, not all that long ago, when Luca Guadagnino’s new film Call Me By Your Name would have been something of a fringe item. A florid gay love story, set in the rarefied playground of wealthy white academics who use “summer” as a verb, awash in Euro-art flourishes inspired by the likes of Bertolucci and Antonioni, and based on an André Aciman novel treasured chiefly within the LGBT community, it’s the kind of film towards which enraptured critics usually struggle to steer substantial audiences.

Call Me By Your Name review – gorgeous gay love story seduces and overwhelms Read more

Yet since its summery Italian vibes warmed up a snowbound Sundance back in January, Guadagnino’s film has become a somewhat unlikely crossover phenomenon, attracting the interest and approval of such rarely convergent groups as highbrow auteurist critics, middle-aged date-night cinemagoers, Oscar-voting Hollywood insiders, hipster Sufjan Stevens cultists and Reddit-lurking adolescents. The rave reviews were easily seen coming; the obsessive Twitter meme-ification of star Armie Hammer’s white-boy dance moves, not so much.

As things currently stand, it seems to be one of a scant handful of 2017 films with enough cross-quadrant appeal to make a serious run for the best picture Oscar. Earlier this week, the film’s field-topping haul of Independent Spirit nominations had pundits seriously considering the possibility that, a year after Moonlight’s history-making win, the Academy might hand its top prize to a queer drama for the second year in a row. In a banner year for LGBT cinema, with such festival hits as Beach Rats, BPM (Beats Per Minute), God’s Own Country and A Fantastic Woman all finding receptive audiences, Call Me By Your Name appears to have been designated 2017’s rainbow flag-bearer.

Does such mainstream acceptance come with a degree of compromise, however? Amid all the unreserved hosannas, a few critical voices – even largely admiring ones – have questioned whether Guadagnino, in successfully courting a wider audience for the film, has somewhat diluted its queerness. Call Me By Your Name may tell the story of an intense, physically combustible attraction between a 17-year-old boy and a 24-year-old man – but it’s more sensually evocative than it is sexually explicit: for starters, Hammer and the breakout star Timothée Chalamet both had no-full-frontal-nudity clauses written into their contracts. The film’s key conversation-piece scene depicts the younger partner masturbating into a ripe peach. Once the two lovers begin having sex for the first time, however, the camera coyly drifts over to an open window, their early coital moans gentle in the background – the kind of tasteful dodge that practically nods to Code-era Hollywood.

Opinion is divided over how much the film’s distinctly hidden sausage-hiding really matters. For some, it’s a sellout: an evasion that betrays a kind of internalised homophobia, playing to moderate straight audiences who accept homosexuality in principle as long as they don’t have to see anything icky. Fuelling such complaints is the fact that the film shows an instance of heterosexual intercourse, between Chalamet’s bicurious character and a casual girlfriend played by Esther Garrel, in more graphic detail. To add insult to injury, the film’s UK distributor, Sony Pictures, promoted the film with a blatantly misleading tweet featuring an image of Chalamet and Garrel, under a critical quote describing the film as “a romance overwhelming in its intensity”.

Leaving aside such crass marketing gaffes, others see the film’s tempered gay sexuality as a mainstream concession that puts the film on an equal footing with comparable straight-themed prestige dramas. With sex at the multiplex a less common phenomenon than it was in the 1990s heyday of erotic blockbusters like Basic Instinct – even the much-ballyhooed Fifty Shades films have played things pretty vanilla to date – some have argued that toning down the sexual content of Aciman’s book, as the film does, normalises rather than stigmatises the romance in question. As to whether that’s a good thing, well, the debate splinters further – and even that’s before you get to the issue of the age difference between the two men, a simmering, contentious point of potential controversy that is, admittedly, possibly defused by the film’s sexual mildness.

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One of the film’s own screenwriters, the lauded 89-year-old film-maker James Ivory, hinted at his own disappointment with the film’s tamer approach in an interview with Variety: “Certainly in my screenplay there was all sorts of nudity … and there isn’t, which I think is kind of a pity,” he said. “It’s just this American attitude. Nobody seems to care that much, or be shocked, about a totally naked woman. It’s the men. This is something that must be so deeply cultural that one should ask: ‘Why?’”

Guadagnino, however, has defended the film’s inexplicitness as an artistic choice, not merely a commercial consideration. “It’s as if you said there are not enough shots of Shanghai. I don’t understand why there has to be Shanghai in this movie,” he vented to Vulture. One might counter that a man’s penis has a more obvious place in gay Italian summer romance than shots of the Shanghai skyline, but the director stands firm: “I pride myself on a more dignified and sophisticated sense of voyeurism than a need to stare at other people’s sexes.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Timothée Chalamet, left, and Armie Hammer in a scene from Call Me By Your Name. Photograph: AP

That is entirely his choice to make, though the words “dignified and sophisticated” are somewhat loaded ones: it would be possible, surely, to directly depict two exceedingly beautiful men making passionate love at no cost to the film’s cultivated elegance. For this critic, Call Me By Your Name’s skittishness in this department is a false beat in an otherwise pretty immaculate work, not because it betrays a larger cause – I look forward to the day when LGBT cinema is a sufficiently broad and accepted genre to serve different audiences with cosy comfort fare and gutsy provocations alike – but because it jars with the generous spirit of the film itself. Call Me By Your Name, like much of Guadagnino’s work, is principally a ripe, lovely celebration of sensory pleasure, be it in the form of food, flesh or music: in this context, that discreet pan away from the mattress and to the window feels like having a glass of champagne ripped from your hand mid-sip.

Moonlight, the film whose Oscar crown Guadagnino’s film is looking to inherit, went likewise soft on its gay sexual content. Its pivotal scene of erotic contact, a handjob between two teenage boys on a beach, was shot and cut with reserved tact, focused on facial reaction above all else. I have no doubt that this restraint helped the film break through to straight audiences and awards voters – perhaps it would still have won best picture if it had culminated in a graphic scene of intercourse between André Holland and Trevante Rhodes, but I doubt it.

But there was a logic for such shyness in the film’s own storytelling, centred as it was on a man who had repressed his sexual identity to a crippling point, that I don’t quite see in Guadagnino’s very different, more blazingly romantic wallow. Earlier this year, weeks before Moonlight’s surprise Oscar coup, I asked if gay cinema “has to be sexless to succeed” – an oversimplified question, admittedly, and one that should allow for flexibility and swift change at this exciting watershed point for LGBT representation on screen. The very welcome success of Call Me By Your Name, however, isn’t changing the conversation just yet.