Call Me By Your Name

This was our final film: the result of a quick committee discussion after we discovered that it was impossible to find a sing-along version of Beauty and the Beast.

After the reviews of the film I'd read I was keen to see it and was not disappointed, although some members did not attend as they did not approve of the subject matter. I can quite understand why the film topped the  poll of the Guardian Best Films of 2017 in both the UK and USA, and James Ivory's awards for the screenplay are a tribute to grey power everywhere: it certainly did not come across as an old man's film.

Here are my notes:

Call Me by Your Name

USA 2017        132 minutes

Director:          Luca Guadagnino

Starring:            Arnie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg

Awards and Nominations

• Won Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (James Ivory) and Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Timothee Chalamet), Best Film and Best Original Song
• Won BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay (James Ivory) and BAFTA nominations for Best Actor (Timothee Chalamet), Best Film and Best Director
• A further 80 wins and 189 nominations

“This priority is often overlooked, but pure sensual pleasure is an important part of cinema. So it’s a thrill to see a really outstanding film which provides it, as well as being itself about sensual pleasure – about the desire that precedes it, about an ecstatic submission to love, about the intelligent cultivation of all these things. It is a story of a passionate affair between an older and younger man and reaches out to anyone with a pulse.”

Peter Bradshaw

In the summer of 1983 in Italy Elio (Timothee Chalamet), the son of an ex-pat American academic, spends his time playing classical music, reading and flirting with his friend Marzia. When Oliver (Arnie Hammer) an American graduate student arrives in Italy to take up an internship he begins a relationship with Elio that soon goes beyond friendship.

This multi-award winning film is the end product of a fascinating combination of US and European film-making talent after initial attempts to make it ended in development hell. The film rights to Andre Aciman’s novel had been sold before publication but the producers then spent several years trying to find an appropriate screenwriter and director for the project. Eventually they approached Luca Guadagnino to direct the film but he declined due to pre-existing commitments although he agreed to act as location consultant as the film was to be shot on location in Northern Italy. Guadagnino subsequently suggested that he co-direct the film with James Ivory and Ivory then worked with him on a screenplay before standing down as co-director, a decision which he said resulted from the unwillingness of the financiers to have two directors. Thus Guadagnino directed the film and Ivory became the sole credited screenwriter, and at the age of 89 became the oldest winner of a competitive Oscar.

Guadagnino saw the film as the final instalment of his thematic Desire trilogy following on from I Am Love (2009) (BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Language Film) and A Bigger Splash (2015). He described the film as an “homage to fathers”, referring both to his own father and the directors Jean Renoir, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Bernardo Bertolucci, all of whose films have inspired him.

At its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival the film received a standing ovation followed by a ten minute ovation after its screening at the New York Film Festival. By March 2018 the film had grossed US$ 38.0 million against a production budget of US$3.5 million thus making it the third highest grossing release in 2017 for Sony Pictures Classics. The film also topped The Guardian’s lists of the best films of 2017 both in the UK and the USA.

 Here's the trailer:

 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Here are my notes for this week's screening.  As the film is set in India we'll be serving a selection of Indian snacks and beer to get the punters in the mood.

Despite some of the UK reviews the film seems to have been a sleeper hit, and we have had many requests to screen it, so hopefully we will have a good audience. 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

UK 2011                      118 minutes

Director:                      John Madden

Starring:                        Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Ronald Pickup and Dev Patel

 “How can I suggest what a delight this film is? Let me try a little shorthand. Recall some of the wonderful performances you've seen from Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and the others, and believe me when I say that this movie finds rich opportunities for all of them.  Director John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love") has to juggle to keep his subplots in the air, but these actors are so distinctive, they do much of the work for him.”

Roger Ebert

A group of seven British ex-pats leave the UK to travel to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a retirement destination for “the elderly and beautiful”, in India.  All the characters have their own reason for making the move, but the most urgent is that local prices make retirement possible for all of them.

In the first half of the 1980s there was a cycle of films and television productions about Britain’s preoccupation with India and its imperial history, ranging from the early Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (1983), the TV series The Jewel in the Crown (1982) to David Lean’s epic version of A Passage to India (1984), all based on novels that explored aspects of the Anglo-Indian experience and life in the Raj.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is also based on a novel (by Deborah Moggach), but one that explores the English experience of India in the twenty-first century, as a place of off-shoring, outsourcing and call centres.

John Madden made his name with the TV film Mrs Brown (1997) and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), of which starred Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson, before moving to Hollywood where his subsequent films have included Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) and more recently a thriller called The Debt (2011), which starred Tom Wilkinson with Helen Mirren.  He had originally cast Peter O’Toole and Julie Christie to play Norman and Madge before replacing them by Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie, and subsequently confirmed that he had also considered Eileen Atkins and John Hurt for roles in the film.

 The film has not yet won any awards but there are rumours in the US of a likely nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Maggie Smith.

Here's the trailer: