André Aciman’s novel, and Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film, is saturated with ancient Greek art. They are not backdrop elements, but arguments. The crumbling statues in the Perlman villa garden, the Greco-Roman bronzes that Oliver and Dr. Pearlman are tasked with cataloguing, are objects symbolizing the film’s secret thesis.
The pivotal scene makes this explicit. Elio’s father, a classics professor, delivers an impromptu lecture on the Greeks’ relationship to beauty and desire. The ancient world, he suggests, had no fear of the impulse to want a beautiful thing. There was no shame attached to the longing itself. The statues in the film embody this. They are frankly, unselfconsciously beautiful, and they expect to be desired.
There is something platonic in the film’s visual logic. Guadagnino keeps returning to those marble and bronze figures, weathered, partial, luminous in the Italian summer light, as if they hold the answer to what Elio is feeling but cannot yet name. In the Symposium, Plato describes desire as the recognition of something the soul already knows. The statues seem to know. They have always known. Elio is simply catching up.
The Greco-Roman bronze pulled from the sea, cool, perfect, impossible, functions almost as a mirror. Oliver moves like that. Elio cannot stop looking. The Greeks understood this experience and built a theology around it. Kalos, beautiful, was also a moral category. To be beautiful was to be, in some sense, good and true. The ache of looking was perception.
What the film borrows from Greek art is ultimately its refusal of shame. These statues stood in public. They were touched, admired, and desired openly. Call Me By Your Name reaches back across centuries to recover something the ancient world took for granted, which is that desire and honesty felt is closer to the sacred than the scandalous.
About the Author
Morgan Avery Mucha is a junior year art history student specializing in Ancient Greek art, with a focus on visual culture and material/ religious practice. She can read and write Ancient (Attic) Greek and has written for her academic blog, Art Abloom, for three years, engaging with classical art, archaeology, and historical interpretation.
Read more on the Honors Blog.
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