A 17-year-old boy falls into a forbidden romance with the summer intern who comes to live with them.

Call Me By Your Name is remarkable for two reasons. One, it is a love story of debilitating tenderness. Based on the book by the same name by André Aciman, 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) falls headfirst into his first true relationship, which exceeds the cheeky flirting he does with friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Only it’s the summer of 1983 in Italy, and he isn’t allowed to feel love and lust alike for the golden, sculpted, impossibly cool and distant 24-year-old intern, Oliver (Armie Hammer). He’s there to help Elio’s father do research, and through his daily interactions with Elio, a sort of glimmering chemistry steeps. As they become friends, there is the yearning for more, the additional intimacy of lovers. Elio is wretched, forced to be alone as he confronts the most powerful feelings he has ever felt. In some communities today, gay love is still treated as unnatural, poisonous. But the politics of it have a more transparent presence in the film, affirming unspokenly Elio’s desire as forbidden and barred. Chalamet delivers his performance with a totally honest vulnerability, the façades of both young men beginning to crack as they become closer. Hammer, who worked on the likes of blockbusters The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Lone Ranger, draws an exquisite range of emotion for the seemingly flippantly cool Oliver. Both Elio and Oliver are unsure of what is happening, afraid to fall too hard. And it’s not a complicated story, allowing the film’s director, Luca Guadagnino, to explore all the tones of love. The ending, while realistic, is devastating.

Two, the film is gorgeous. It’s picturesque and lush, one scene in minty blue water almost too pretty to believe. Director Guadagnino frames every scene with chalky pastel colors, rich golden light, and unreasonably lush fauna. Set at their antique family villa in Lombardy, Elio is clearly surrounded by culture, abundance, fertility. He slips between English, French, and Italian, and idle afternoons are spent by the swimming pool reading or napping. The constancy of fruits all around them, tight and sweet, reaffirms the dizzying sort of desire in the air that accompanies coming-of-age. Only this love is the forbidden fruit, untouchable and impossible to deny. You feel the power it has over Elio, who flounders, inexperienced. That Elio’s father is a specialist in antiquities is too perfect; the culture that idealized the male form and prized male lovers quietly speaks to the timelessness of their love. Even when it must remain anonymous. As the film title, Call Me By Your Name, suggests, for to call one’s lover by their own name gives nothing away. But Guadagnino’s film gives everything.