Name: The Movies That Influenced Call Me By Your Name
Uploaded: 2026-02-20T17:06:38.000Z
Duration: 8 min 56 s
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Can't tell you the number of books I've read here.

We haven't done anything to be ashamed of.

It would be pretty cool to design a film studies course around Call Me by youy Name.

The movie opens up its own interesting lane in film history, populated by auteurs trying to disappear from their work, which is a paradox worth exploring.

The movies that this class would feature, a handful of which you just saw in the opening sequence, have similarities that are focused by Call Me by youy Name and by director Luca Guadagnino's vision.

It's not that Guadagnino quotes or pays homage to his influences.

He actually learns the lessons that these influences teach and applies them in a way that adds to his personal style.

The most obvious influence, I think, are the films of James Ivory, specifically two of his E.M.

forester adaptations, a Room With a View and Morris.

I say obvious because Ivory was In his late 80s, no less, the screenwriter for Call Me by youy Name.

The mark of his long career at the Merchant Ivory production company is all over this movie.

Now, you might not know Merchant Ivory, the director producer team of Ivory and his life partner, Ismail Merchant.

But along with their screenwriter, Ruth Jalvala, they created 44 films together, often highbrow literary adaptations, period pieces with lavish costumes and sets.

Now, this may sound like stuffy, pompous filmmaking, but the Merchant Ivory films are anything but.

In A Room with a View, for example, nature is a symbol of freedom against the social restrictions of Edwardian England.

Ivory, like Guadagnino, captures the warm, tactile qualities of being outdoors and uses the sense memory that these images and sounds evoke as a way to trigger empathy for the characters.

In both films, the desire for summer afternoons is paralleled with the desire for love or sex in Morris, an adaptation of Forrester's novel of homosexual love.

The important ways that both Morris and Elio tentatively realize and act upon their feelings are physical, not verbal.

This is what a good filmmaker and good actors bring to an adaptation.

The translation of dialogue into gesture and action.

A second key influence are the films of Eric Rohmer.

The last of the French New Wave directors, whose style was less iconoclastic than Godard or Truffaut, yet whose career sustained in quality much longer than many of his contemporaries, Rohmer is known as a very wordy filmmaker.

His movies feature characters having extended philosophical conversations on love and design.

Yet what Guadagnino draws from him is his simplicity, his unsentimental presentation of characters in space, and

Like the great Jean Renoir who came before him, Rohmer is interested in realism, but

Like Rohmer's and Renoir's, Guadagnino's camera in Call Me by youy Name isn't showy and his editing isn't manipulative.

Guadagnino and his cinematographer only used one lens, a 35mm, to mimic roughly the feel of human eyesight.

And the camera follows the action, but in the way an observer might.

In all of these filmmakers, long takes don't feel stylized or distracting.

They function as a window into the environment.

And it's important that we see that environment, the spaces these characters inhabit.

So depth of field is usually deep and the use of close ups is rare.

As Rohmere once said, the reason I don't like a close up is because it excludes, it doesn't add, it takes away, it suppresses the relationship of the character to the set.

And what's important for Guadagnino is that he gives the actors enough room and time for the space between them to become charged with emotion.

Finally, maybe the most important influence on the structure of Call Me by youy Name is the French director Maurice Piala, especially his film A no Sores.

Piela is another figure on the outer rim of the French New Wave who barely has any recognition in America.

His films are rough and unsentimental to the extreme, even sloppy at times, but

They're driven by people who are slaves to impulse.

And what Guadagnino admires about Piela is how these impulses drive the construction of the narrative.

It's almost dizzying how Enosa Moores, for example, a coming of age film about a sexually charged adolescent, trips from scene to scene without consideration for a traditional story arc.

The cut between two shots could represent a jump of two seconds or two months, and

Call Me by youy Name isn't as extreme as this, but

Guadagnino's narrative follows a similar rhythm, where the through line isn't the developments of a three act plot, but

rather the energy of Elio's desire and how that manifests these unusual structures are so important because narrative art is one of the ways in which we model our own lives.

And there can be falseness in what is sometimes called Hollywood films that influences our expectations of experience.

For instance, the whole time I was watching Call Me by youy Name, I was anxious for the person or the institution that would inevitably challenge Elio and Oliver's affair.

It's something I'd come to expect in films and stories of this kind.

But when that didn't happen and I released the that pent up energy, it was a revelatory feeling, like the film was opening up a new corner of life, a different way to see things.

You don't have to understand these films or these directors to enjoy Call Me by youy Name.

In fact, this lineage is built around the notion that you can have a radical effect on viewers without a radical style.

I think Guadagnino Cinefelia, his love of films is the very best kind.

It doesn't exclude people for not being in the know.

It brings influences together in the service of a brand new style to appreciate.

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Thank you guys again and I'll see you next week for a new video.