summer ending, and the last eight minutes of call me by your name

I watched Luca Gaudagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) for the first time on a plane. It’s a rocky start for your relationship with one of your favourite films, but we got through it together. I was twenty two and I was flying home from Montreal. For reasons that will become obvious in a couple of paragraphs, the last eight minutes of the film were the ones that hit me hardest. Now eight years later, I’ve seen the film half a dozen times and read the book at least twice. I don’t know if it’s a romance to me anymore. Or if it is, it’s not a romance I desperately want to linger on and obsess over. But as a story about growing up, about watching the summer end and finding you aren’t the same person you were when it started, it remains one of my favourites. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography is so beautiful I had to give myself a hard limit on the number of times I could say ‘luminous’ in this essay. To say nothing of the soundtrack.

So this essay is an ode to those last eight minutes and why I fell in love with them.

And in particular, it’s an ode to the film’s lighting and colours. I think the whole story is told in lighting and colours. You could put your hand over every actor and miss every line of dialogue and know exactly what story you were watching from the lights and colours alone. The love story I care about here is the one that exists between me and the patterns of light on walls and trees.

Call Me By Your Name has some of the most beautiful colour grading in cinema. And I’m a colour grading nepo baby. My dad worked in a tech job for the BBC’s post production office for forty-ish years. It wasn’t a greatly glamorous or highly paid job, and anyone who ever tried to talk to him cause they thought they could achieve their creative dreams by charming him left sorely disappointed. But one of the defining memories of my childhood is trying to watch TV on my own and then my dad drifts through and says ‘how can you watch this? they’re all the wrong colour! they’re all the wrong shape!’. And then he’d sit down and fiddle with the aspect ratio until my programme was over and I had no idea what had happened. It didn’t make me rich or influential, and it certainly doesn’t fund a PhD, but I have ancestral opinions about colour grading.

Those last eight minutes make the whole film make sense to me. They’re what makes it beautiful.