FILM: Call Me By Your Name

What an achingly beautiful film. Oh to be 17 again, and to experience such an idyllic summer of first love, first sex, and first heartbreak, in an charming Italian village, surrounded by cosmopolitan liberal intellectuals, with nothing to do but read, play the piano, ride bikes, swim, dance, and pick fresh fruit. And make love, of course. Never mind that it's 1983, and that the central love affair of the film is between two young men. These boys, and everyone else around them, seem delightfully insouciant about homosexuality. If there is even a whiff of stigma in their world, they're more self-conscious about being Jewish than they are about being gay. Their summer of discovery has only its own lovely complications, completely free of external worldly cares, as unburdened as the dappled sunlight coming through the leaves of the peach and apricot trees. The story is as fresh and as sweet as the just-squeezed apricot juice they drink, and the metaphor of summer love being as pure, sweet, and perishable as summer fruit pervades the film. You will cry tears of wistful joy when the summer inevitably ends. And you will never look at a peach the same way again.