Moonlight director Barry Jenkins loved Call Me By Your Name

By: PTI | Los Angeles | Published: January 2, 2018 10:21 am Call Me By Your Name is nominated for best drama film, best actor in a drama (Chalamet), and best supporting actor in a drama (Hammer) at the Golden Globes.

Barry Jenkins, the director of last year’s Oscar-winning gay coming-of-age drama Moonlight, has given a glowing review to this year’s standout movie Call Me By Your Name. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, follows 17-year-old Elio (Chalamet). He falls in love with a handsome doctoral student (Hammer), who has come to intern at his father’s sun- drenched Italian villa during the summer.

“CALL ME BY YOUR NAME — sweetness without a trace of sentimentality; a work made without fear of sentimentality”, Jenkins wrote. “Sweetness beside sex. Sex that transmutes love. An intellectually rigorous examination that never loses warmth. Earnest, mature and endearing the whole way through,” Jenkins wrote.

Moonlight dealt with a similar subject with the story of a young black man who grapples with his sexuality while growing up through an impoverished Miami backdrop. Jenkins said it was refreshing to see a work that “aligns curiosity, fear and courage side by side, image to image, human beings drifting from one emotion to the next and back, revealing and retreating from themselves, from life; all of us capable of so much, but allowing ourselves so very little”.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME — sweetness without a trace of sentimentality; a work made without fear of sentimentality. Sweetness beside sex. Sex that transmutes love. An intellectually rigorous examination that never loses warmth. Earnest, mature and endearing the whole way through.

— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) December 29, 2017

Refreshing to see a work that aligns curiosity, fear and courage side by side, image to image, human beings drifting from one emotion to the next and back, revealing and retreating from themselves, from life; all of us capable of so much, but allowing ourselves so very little.

— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) December 29, 2017

And I’m glad I waited to see it in a theatre. Had no idea it was shot on emulsion. I may be reaching, but there’s a tension between the grain and the focus here. A delicate tension for sure. A struggle to resolve. A fleeting, elegiac struggle to resolve.

— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) December 29, 2017

A supremely delicate and humane work. Elegant and brilliant in its modesty. For in this film Luca has gotten to the essence of a clear principle: there are few things more profound than the evolution of a human heart. And there’s no more direct way to access one’s true self.

— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) December 29, 2017

To that end, it was not lost on me that in a film titled CALLED ME BY YOUR NAME, the last word spoken was….

— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) December 29, 2017