The Sentimental Journeys Of "Call Me By Your Name" and "Lady Bird"

“The great irony of Belle de Jour is that a sixty-seven year old Spanish sur­real­ist has set out to lib­er­ate human­ity of its bour­geois sen­ti­ment­al­ity only to col­lide with the most sen­ti­ment­al gen­er­a­tion of flowery feel­ings in human his­tory,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice in the early May 1968. His fil­ing dead­line was prob­ably right before the events in France of, you know, May 1968, but even so you could say his over­all grasp of the zeit­geist as he wrote those words was likely too inflec­ted by some kind of Summer of Love hangover. All that not­with­stand­ing, I have been reminded of Sarris’ obser­va­tion by the elab­or­ate praise bestowed upon two recent film releases, Lady Bird, an early-2000s com­ing of age story with auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al ele­ments, writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by Greta Gerwig, and Call Me By Your Name, an early-1980s com­ing of age story scrip­ted by James Ivory from a nov­el by André Aciman, and dir­ec­ted by Luca Guadagnino.

They are the most crit­ic­ally beloved movies of the year, and while they encom­pass a cer­tain amount of heart­break and loss, they each hand the view­er a grat­it­ude list—for fam­ily, to be precise—to pon­der as the clos­ing cred­its scroll up. They are relent­lessly nice movies. They are sentimental.

In her essay “The Miseducation of Lady Bird” in The Baffler, Lauren Oyler circles around this point a bit. After express­ing befuddle­ment over the fact that she has encountered “old white men,” one “middle aged man” and three young women “sport­ing leath­er back­packs and elab­or­ate Nikes,” who were more moved by the film than she was, Oyner homes in on the finale of the movie, dur­ing which its lead char­ac­ter Christine goes to church, then calls her moth­er. While both actions as depic­ted are, I think, giv­en suf­fi­cient dra­mat­ic but­tress­ing for them to make both nar­rat­ive and (for some) emo­tion­al sense, Oyner is not wrong to call the speech “unapo­lo­get­ic­ally corny” and “exactly what a moth­er would want to happen.”

Lady Bird is about recon­cili­ation, and in its world view recon­cili­ation involves recog­niz­ing who your blood is. It means finally under­stand­ing that it’s a shitty thing to tell your moth­er that you will pay her back all the money she spent on your upbring­ing just so that you your­self may have the priv­ilege of nev­er hav­ing to speak to her again. Agains, I think the movie sells this point very well. Directorially, Gerwig nev­er puts a foot wrong. Lady Bird is very assured and very much believes in the effects it wants to achieve. One thing it nev­er does—and I under­stand that on a not insig­ni­fic­ant level it is because it’s not this kind of movie’s func­tion to do so any­way, maybe—is ques­tion why it is salut­ary to be a movie that makes you want to call your moth­er after you get out of the theater.

It’s as if this is a giv­en, just the way everything ought to turn out. And this is not, for instance, what we get from the work of Maurice Pialat, whose ruth­lessly unsen­ti­ment­al views of the fam­ily lives of chil­dren and teens are among the greatest high­lights of French cinema. And as soft as Truffaut’s por­traits of Antoine Doinel in his adult­hood could get, one thing they nev­er fea­tured was any kind of rap­proche­ment with the par­ents of The 400 Blows.

There is nev­er any­thing too ugly in Lady Bird; there is almost noth­ing at all ugly in Call Me By Your Name. When its 17-year-old prot­ag­on­ist, Elio, is con­foun­ded by his erot­ic feel­ings toward Oliver, the spec­tac­u­larly hunky aca­dem­ic assist­ant to his pro­fess­or fath­er, he is at first barely aware of the sup­port sys­tem that’s devoted to help­ing him fig­ure it out. An American aca­dem­ic sea­son­ally situ­ated in a most idyll­ic and sleepy corner of Italy in sum­mer, Elio’s dad, Lyle, observes Elio and Oliver’s dance at a benign not-quite remove. Annella, the moth­er (played by Amira Casar, best known in the U.S. for her work in, um, Catherine Breillat’s 2004 Anatomy of Hell) evinces a con­cern that’s per­haps disin­genu­ous but delib­er­ately nev­er any­thing like effec­tu­al. The situ­ations and cir­cum­scribed worlds of these movies are elab­or­ate demon­stra­tions of the man­tra of John Lennon’s anti-revolutionary song “Revolution:” “Don’t you know it’s gonna be/all right.”

Of course all of this speaks, indir­ectly per­haps, to prob­lems of depic­tion. Lots of people, I sup­pose, have movies in their heads about their child­hoods. But the worse the things recol­lec­ted, the harder it is to con­struct the movie ver­sion, in your head or on a movie set. When I was in my final year of grade school I had a growth spurt, and my dad gave me this beau­ti­ful fringed suede jack­et that he had bought in Spain when he lived there as a teen­ager. One day I wore it to school, and by the end of the day, about two-thirds of its fringes were gone, picked off by class­mates who were not ter­ribly fond of me. I can see how that would play in a movie scene. A few years later, right after turn­ing 14, I went to a CYO dance in my town and there were two women in their early 20s there, who thought I was cute. They were shar­ing from a flask, and they offered me a few swigs from it, and a bit later on one of them was mak­ing out with me, much to the dis­ap­prob­a­tion of one of the dance chap­er­ones, who was the fath­er of a guy who liked to give me a mild pum­mel­ing every now and then. We (the woman and I, not that dude’s fath­er) left the dance and went a few blocks down to the house where she lived and she backed me up against the oak tree in front of it and showed me that she was car­ry­ing a con­dom. At the time I had very little idea of what a con­dom actu­ally looked like, and I knew my par­ents were gonna be hella pissed off if I came home too late, so I went home. I know what that would look like as a movie scene—pretty funny, pos­sibly. Around the same time anoth­er class­mate bul­lied me into a series of not un-violent trans­ac­tions that I had no real way of pro­cessing, which I’m still on occa­sion anguished by, and which I won’t go into detail about only in part because I don’t…want…to. (When this fel­low, who seems not to have thrived in adult­hood, got in touch with me again a few years ago, for the first time that I can remem­ber, my stom­ach seemed to lit­er­ally sink.) I couldn’t make a movie out of that. Neither Gerwig nor Guadagnino would want to, I sus­pect. Maurice Pialat, not to flat­ter my adoles­cence, would eat it right up.

Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name want noth­ing to do with this kind of dis­com­fort. Lady Bird is com­mend­ably dis­creet, but per­haps unreal­ist­ic, in depict­ing Christine’s first ser­i­ous sexu­al encounter with­in that time-honored cine­mat­ic con­ven­tion of bra sex. Although the cent­ral sexu­al rela­tion­ship in Call Me By Your Name is between two men, the only full-frontal nud­ity in the movie is female. While usurped ori­gin­al dir­ect­or James Ivory has expressed dis­ap­point­ment at the rel­at­ively chaste depic­tions in Guadagnino’s film (and the dir­ect­or him­self has offered the craven defense that the “mar­ket” wouldn’t bear any­thing more expli­cit), most people who’ve writ­ten about the movie are pretty cool about it not being, you know, too gay. Jeffrey Wells is hardly alone in his con­sid­er­a­tion of what the movie is “really” about: “What counts is that the mood and drift of this film isn’t really about straight or gay or any­thing in between. It’s about ‘being there’ in every pos­sible com­pre­hen­sion of that term — about sen­su­al samplings, sum­mer aromas, warm sun­shine, fresh water and that swoony, lifty feel­ing, etc,” he wrote in January of this year. Other writers with more invest­ment in being per­ceived as sens­it­ive to cer­tain cul­tur­al drifts have tempered that Universal Vibration take. One straight cis-male crit­ic pro­claimed that this pic­ture could take an auto­mat­ic place in the “Queer Cinema Canon,” which pro­nounce­ment has received some push­back from writers who, in some respects under­stand­ably, believe the Queer Cinema Canon be decided by the queer. From where I sat, the story as real­ized by Guadagnino, with its attend­ant extreme care not to depict the sex expli­citly, could be said to iron the queer­ness out of the situ­ation alto­geth­er. The movie opts instead for a soft coun­ter­cul­ture “it’s all love and it’s all good” per­spect­ive, artic­u­lated in the much-praised speech that Michael Stuhlbarg, as Lyle, does deliv­er with spec­tac­u­lar care near the movie’s end. Even Marzia, the French teen­ager whom Elio uses then throws away like an old dishrag (Esther Garrel, the afore­men­tioned female nude), is full of not just for­give­ness but con­grat­u­lat­ory fellow-feeling with respect to Elio’s self-actualization via heartbreak.

In a sense, then, this is the fur­thest thing from a “queer movie;” its whole pro­ject is to de-queer Elio’s mode of being. That’s the point of the film’s final shot. Yes, he’s heart­broken and cry­ing, but there’s “beau­ti­ful” music, he’s lit­er­ally crouch­ing in front of a fire­place (the hearth!), and behind him his fam­ily, while giv­ing him his space, is pre­par­ing a sump­tu­ous hol­i­day meal.

As for Lady Bird, the movie comes with its own feel-good sequel, in the cur­rent per­son of Gerwig. In inter­views and on tele­vi­sion shows we have access to her story. Not just of her life on her own, but of the mak­ing of the movie: the win­some let­ters she wrote to musi­cians explain­ing how much her otherwise–perhaps-much-costlier-to-license song selec­tions were so import­ant to her. The way she was able to hire a cine­ma­to­graph­er and merely instruct him to make the film “look like a memory,” which cer­tainly beats hav­ing to learn how to do that one­self. How she wore a prom dress while film­ing the prom scenes. When Matthew Maher turns up near the movie’s end, play­ing a char­ac­ter who gives Christine a cru­cial bit of inform­a­tion, I thought of the very par­tic­u­lar brand of clout that allows a film­maker to hire one of the best act­ors on the New York stage for the express pur­pose of hav­ing him say one word.

These are movies where everything’s going to work out, because “at the end of the day” every­body shares the same val­ues. A rather more tough-minded movie about fam­ily was made in America in 1937. There are no real vil­lains in Leo McCarey’s Make Way For Tomorrow, but the tragedy that ulti­mately befalls its cent­ral couple, a pair of seni­ors who are forced to sep­ar­ate forever, comes from their hav­ing raised their now-adult chil­dren  in an American val­ues sys­tem that all but obliges those chil­dren to for­sake them. Lady Bird pos­its a fam­ily dynam­ic that’s fraught, but even­tu­ally all falls on the same side of pro­vi­sion­al ideo­logy, while Call Me By Your Name pos­its a para­dise in European remove where romantic loss is ameli­or­ated in that spec­tac­u­larly nur­tur­ing hearth. That these cozy fantas­ies are anim­at­ing so much enthu­si­asm is, as they say, very telling about the cur­rent cul­tur­al moment.