by Murtada
If you thought that after the Oscars you’d never hear about Call Me By Your Name, think again. The movie is now out on DVD but that is not why it’s in the headlines once again. Oscar winning screenwriter James Ivory would just not let his displeasure with the non-nudity in the film die. We are all for a true legend like Ivory to say whatever the fuck he wants, whenever he wants. So we are all in for his recent interview that's making the rounds.
In the CMBYN cultural wars of last Oscar season there are two camps. The first thinks that it lessens the power of its story by shying away from explicit nudity in its sex scenes. The second thinks that was the right aesthetic choice for the story and that the film is not “coy” because it shows Armie Hammer wiping cum from his chest. This is a short and reductive way of briefly explaining the different POVs; each camp of course has more nuance...
This writer is firmly in the first camp and frankly that cutaway in Elio and Oliver's first sexual encounter, through the window to the trees outside, is an embarrassing choice for a story about sexual obsession and first love. Specially when the film did not cutaway from the different sex coupling.
Ivory has always maintained that his screenplay contained nudity. He even went further and divulged the actors’ contracts had non-nudity clauses, and that his choice to play Oliver was Shia Labeouf. If you’ve seen Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, you get the shade he's throwing. Now with Oscar in hand, he’s going even further and calling Luca Guadagnino a liar.
When Luca says he never thought of putting nudity in, that is totally untrue. He sat in this very room where I am sitting now, talking about how he would do it, so when he says that it was a conscious aesthetic decision not to – well, that’s just bullshit.
He goes on explaining why the absence of full frontal nudity still bothers him.
When people are wandering around before or after making love, and they’re decorously covered with sheets, it’s always seemed phoney to me. I never liked doing that. And I don’t do it, as you know. [In Maurice], the two guys have had sex and they get up and you certainly see everything there is to be seen. To me, that’s a more natural way of doing things than to hide them, or to do what Luca did, which is to pan the camera out of the window toward some trees. Well …
And here is the clicker, he doesn’t end it there. Rather, according to The Guardian, “gives a derisive snort”.
Call Me By Your Name remains a story beautifully told and acted, by Timothée Chalamet. And it seems that it will continue to be in the conversation, whether or not those sequels Guadagnino keeps talking about happen. And if Ivory has anything to do about it, we will keep hearing exactly what he thinks at all times. Derisive snort and all. Have you already bought your DVD/streaming copy?