Call me by your name

I'm aware this has hit a lot of people's top ten lists. And it's not on mine. It's not by any means a hideous film. But for me, anyway, it's a case of something fundamental not working for me. In a romance, no matter what you have to buy that the characters are drawn to each other - that there's a passion dwelling underneath that neither can resist.

And I just don't buy it here. I'm told it, they go through the motions of moving towards each other and slowly exploring each other's touch, but ... it just isn't there for me. This is a very ... tasteful film (the script is by James Ivory, best known for being the director half of Merchant Ivory, and there are elements of some of his earlier films in the romantic escape to the Italian countryside for a set of otherwise somewhat uptight American Jews). The pacing is pretty languid, there's a lot of nice explorations of the Tuscan countryside (which, yes, is very pretty) and a little bit of antiquity referencing in among the story of a grad student whose visit to a professor sees him entangled with the 17 year old son of the household. Maybe it's that I'm not entirely convinced by Armie Hammer as anything but variations of the Winklevoss twins - he still feels a little bit too much the jock-ish guy who seems utterly in control of himself - maybe it's just that this feels all very... cultured, very restrained, with not enough of the red meat of passion that I'm really looking for.

Anyway. I'm sure this will do things for other people that it didn't do for me. But it didn't do much for me.